Analysis of journals that did not meet selection criteria for inclusion in the National Library of Medicine collection but have manuscripts in PubMed Central*

(NLM) created PubMed Central (PMC) to serve as a free digital archive for biomedical and life sciences journal literature [1]. In 2005, researchers who received National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding were given the option to voluntarily submit their manuscripts to PMC. Three years later, in 2008, the NIH public access policy was implemented, which required that authors who publish articles based on NIH-funded research must submit the final, peer-reviewed manuscripts to PMC [2, 3]. This requirement ensures free public access to the results of federally funded research. NLM assumed that most NIH-funded research would have a health or life sciences focus and therefore would be published in journals that are in scope for the NLM collection. However, following th