name: PubMed / NCBI E-utilities FinOps
description: Financial operations profile for PubMed and NCBI E-utilities APIs. All NCBI/PubMed APIs are free public services operated by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). There are no usage fees, subscription costs, or commercial licensing fees for API access.
provider: PubMed / NCBI
url: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/home/develop/api/
operatedBy: U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) / National Institutes of Health (NIH)

cost:
  model: Free / Public Good
  pricing: $0.00
  currency: USD
  notes: >
    NCBI/PubMed APIs are a U.S. Government work funded by federal appropriations
    to the National Institutes of Health. All E-utility endpoints, PMC APIs, and
    associated services are provided free of charge to the global research
    community with no metered billing, subscription fees, or commercial licensing
    requirements.

plans:
  - name: Free (No API Key)
    monthlyCost: $0.00
    currency: USD
    rateLimitReqPerSec: 3
    features:
      - Full access to all E-utility endpoints
      - No registration required
      - No expiration

  - name: Free (With API Key)
    monthlyCost: $0.00
    currency: USD
    rateLimitReqPerSec: 10
    features:
      - Full access to all E-utility endpoints
      - Free NCBI account required
      - Higher throughput
      - Eligible for elevated rate limits upon request

dataLicensing:
  - database: PubMed
    license: Public Domain (U.S. Government work)
    notes: >
      PubMed citation data is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain.
      However, underlying publisher content (abstracts, full text) may be subject
      to publisher copyright. Redistribution of bulk citation data should comply
      with NCBI data distribution policies.
    url: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/home/about/policies/

  - database: PubMed Central (PMC) Open Access
    license: Varies by article (Creative Commons, public domain, or publisher-specific)
    notes: >
      PMC Open Access articles are available under various open licenses.
      The OA subset may be used for text mining and bulk download per NCBI
      policies. Commercial use depends on the individual article license.
    url: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/tools/openftlist/

costOptimization:
  - tip: Use History Server (WebEnv and query_key) to store large result sets server-side and avoid re-fetching
  - tip: Batch UID lookups using EPost before calling EFetch to reduce total request count
  - tip: Obtain a free API key to triple throughput from 3 to 10 req/s at no cost
  - tip: Schedule large jobs on weekends or weekday nights (9 PM – 5 AM ET) to avoid peak-hour restrictions
  - tip: Use ESearch with usehistory=y and retmax=0 to count results before downloading large sets
  - tip: Request compressed responses where supported to reduce bandwidth

budget:
  apiCost: $0.00/month
  infrastructureCost: Developer-dependent (compute, storage for cached responses)
  notes: >
    Since the API itself is free, the primary costs for production applications
    using PubMed APIs are developer time, compute resources for parsing and
    storing results, and any third-party infrastructure. There are no API
    vendor invoices to manage.