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Bulk download PMC Open Access articles via FTP for large-scale mining
Passed 23 of 23 test cases with the skill, and 18 of 23 without it.
and 3 more in the full report
5 fixed18 passed either way0 still failing0 broke
Tokens, turns and time describe resource use, not a dollar price.
One of 5 test cases the skill fixed. Same model, same prompt, with and without the skill.
I am collecting a corpus of PubMed Central articles restricted to CC BY-NC licenses for non-commercial academic research. Which exact directory on the PMC FTP server stores the non-commercial open access collection?
| Checked | Without skill | With skill |
|---|---|---|
| Specifies /pub/pmc/oa_noncomm/ as the directory path for non-commercial open access articles | Missed | Passed |
The instructions your model reads when the skill loads.
The PMC FTP Service provides bulk download access to millions of full-text articles from PubMed Central's Open Access Subset. Unlike the single-article APIs (E-utilities, BioC), the FTP service is designed for large-scale corpus construction — downloading entire collections for text mining, NLP training, systematic reviews, and bibliometric analysis. Free, no authentication required.
Note: PMC is migrating to AWS-based Cloud Service in August 2026. FTP paths may change; check official docs for updates.
# FTP (classic)
ftp ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
# Navigate to: /pub/pmc
# HTTPS alternative (recommended)
# Base: https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/
| Dataset | Path | Content | Format |
|---|---|---|---|
| OA Commercial | /pub/pmc/oa_comm/ | CC BY/CC0 articles (commercial use OK) | .tar.gz packages |
| OA Non-Commercial | /pub/pmc/oa_noncomm/ | CC BY-NC articles | .tar.gz packages |
| OA Other | /pub/pmc/oa_other/ | Other open licenses | .tar.gz packages |
| Author Manuscripts | /pub/pmc/manuscript/ | NIH-funded manuscripts | .tar.gz packages |
| Historical OCR | /pub/pmc/historical_ocr/ | Pre-digital scanned articles | .tar.gz |
| File lists | /pub/pmc/oa_file_list.csv | Index of all OA articles | CSV |
Download the master index to plan your downloads:
# Download the OA file list (CSV, ~200MB)
wget https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/oa_file_list.csv
test cases passed, vs 18 / 23 without
More skills from the same source and nearby in the registry, with their headline benchmark lift.