PubMed Central (PMC) was launched in 2000, with a mandate to serve as a free digital archive for life sciences and biomedical literature. In the beginning, it contained just two journals, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America and Molecular Biology of the Cell. A number of BioMed Central journal titles, Nucleic Acids Research, The Plant Cell, and Plant Physiology quickly followed.
Today there are more than 600 full-deposit journals as well as collections of articles arising from NIH-funded research, author manuscripts, books and other documents in the PMC archive. The number of PMC users has also increased; on a typical weekday, about 420,000 users access 740,000 articles. A decade after its creation, PMC houses some two million articles. Of these, about 4,200 are by University of Pittsburgh or UPMC authors.
Parts of this article were reprinted from the NLM Technical Bulletin.
~ Nancy Tannery