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PubMed Central Copyright Information

Most of the material available through the PubMed Central (PMC) site is protected by U.S. and/or foreign copyright laws. For such material, the respective authors, publishers or other copyright holders retain rights for reproduction or redistribution. Users of such material are solely responsible for compliance with copyright restrictions and are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by the copyright holder. Transmission or reproduction of protected material, beyond that allowed by the fair use principles of the copyright laws, requires the written permission of the copyright owners. U.S. fair use guidelines (a PDF file) are available from the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress.

Copyright Statements in PMC

Much of the material in PMC includes an explicit copyright statement in the various versions of the material — Abstract page, Full-text HTML page view, or Full-text PDF file — that may be available. However, the absence of this statement from any or all versions of an article or other item should not be interpreted as the absence of copyright protection. In cases where copyright is held for a complete issue of a journal, rather than individual articles, the copyright statement may appear on the issue cover, the masthead page or other pages that may not have been available to PMC at the time of posting. In case of doubt, users should contact the journal publisher to verify the copyright status of an article.

Open Access Articles

Some items in PMC are made available as Open Access items, in accord with the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing. See the PMC Open Access page for more information.

Links to Publisher-Specific Copyright Information

Use these links to different publishers' sites for additional copyright terms that apply to their respective content in PMC.

American Society for Microbiology
National Academy of Sciences