PubMed is the discovery surface for biomedical research, and for an open access journal the realistic route into it runs through PubMed Central (PMC), the full-text archive run by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM). This page explains the pieces and what a new journal on Scholardemia should expect.
PubMed, PMC, and MEDLINE
- PubMed is the search index. It surfaces records from MEDLINE and from PMC content.
- PMC archives full text. A journal accepted by PMC gets its articles into PubMed via the archive.
- MEDLINE is the curated subset with the strictest selection; most journals pursue it, if at all, long after PMC.
What NLM reviews
PMC applications go through a scientific quality review by an NLM committee, plus a technical evaluation of your article data. Expectations to plan for, honestly:
- A meaningful published record — typically a couple of years of output, or on the order of a few dozen research articles, before the committee will assess quality.
- Documented peer review and publication ethics that stand up to scrutiny.
- An ISSN and complete, accurate article metadata.
- Full text supplied as valid JATS XML — PMC ingests the XML itself, not PDFs.
Preparing with Scholardemia
The technical evaluation is where Scholardemia does the heavy lifting: published articles already carry structured JATS output — the format PMC requires — along with DOIs, licence metadata, and a stable archive. Your side is the scientific record: publish steadily, review rigorously, and keep your policy pages truthful. Record the application’s progress in the indexing panel on your workspace’s Compliance page.