DigitalCommons@TMC Get Started Guide

After you publish your e-journal for a while, you may think about wanting to have it indexed on PubMed. However, despite the fact a lot of people talk about getting indexed in PubMed, however, you don’t really apply to "get indexed in PubMed." However, if links to your articles or citations and abstracts from your journals become searchable in PubMed’s database, it not not only increases trust in your journal’s processes and commitment to science, but also increases your journal exposure. This makes it easier to attract quality submissions.

If you have just started publishing your e-journal, keep publishing on Digital Commons@TMC and track your Readership Map. The minimum Mandatory requirements for inclusion in PubMed Central - PMC is 25 articles peer-reviewed articles needed to have been published. 

• The publisher should have a two-year history of quality scholarly publishing the biomedical or life sciences fields. In some cases, a one-year history may be considered for review.
• Journal must have a registered ISSN.
• The journal must be able to provide NLM with immediate access to its content in accordance with NLM’s Collection Development Guidelines.
• The journal must have published at least 25 peer-reviewed articles.
• The journal needs to meet PMC’s language guidelines.
• The journal primarily consists of one or more of the following types of content: original research and review articles, clinical case reports, data descriptor articles that point to a dataset, and descriptions of clinical or surgical procedures.

If you meet these requirements, you are eligible to fill in the application form.

One of the requirements when sending in the application is the file format, all the peer reviewed series and journals published on Digital Commons@TMC is mainly PDF formats. Per PubMed Central application guidelines, it would need to be XML-based compliant, and unfortunately this is not a service provided by The TMC Library or Digital Commons. Below are some vendors that have successfully provided PMC-compliant XML to PubMed Central in the past. 

• The Charlesworth Group: http://www.charlesworth-group.com/ 
• Data Conversion Lab: https://www.dataconversionlaboratory.com/
• Datapage: http://www.datapage.ie/    
• Aptara: http://www.aptaracorp.com/publishing-services  
• SPI Global: http://www.spi-global.com/
• Newgen: https://www.newgen.co/   
• TNQ: http://www.tnq.co.in/ 
• Sheridan: https://www.sheridan.com/
• Knowledgeworks Global Ltd. https://www.kwglobal.com/
• NovaTechset - https://www.novatechset.com/

Most of these vendors charge $1 to $3 per page for individual journal files (by issue) to be converted to XML, and some also charge extra for illustrations, images, or graphs.

The Citation Validator is necessary for checking the XML, which is VERY finicky!

It will reject something as simple as a "curled" quotation mark vs. ones that are straight up and down. PubMed is also pretty picky about the naming convention for the file: It is suggested to name each of the journal issue files with a file name that includes journal title abbreviation, volume, and issue, e.g., AJPv36i12.xml".

• PMC XML Validator
• PMC Style Checker
• PMC Article Previewer