BioOne

1. BioOne IATUL 23rd Annual ConferenceJune 2-6, 2002 Kansas City, MO NASIG 15th – San Diego BioOne: Exploring a Collaborative Publishing Model Heather Joseph, Chief Operating Officer, BioOne 21 Dupont Circle, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20036 www.bioone.org

2. Current Climate • Initial hope was that advent of electronic delivery would provide fast and easy mechanisms to relieve price pressure, and help create a level playing field • Reality is publishers have found costs generally increase (dual publication modes) . • Cost to Libraries have increased - electronic media, archival concerns, proliferation of print cost + additional % for electronic model, etc.

3. Current Climate Library budget have continued to experience increased strain, and many small non-commercial publishers have been unable to find resources to take advantage of electronic distribution. Strong need for alternatives for these publishers to play in electronic arena. Current alternatives not very appealing, from: • Remain strictly paper-based: (limited usefulness to researchers, unsustainable financial model) • Sell/license contents to commercial interests (has historically resulted in substantially higher prices to library market).

4. Community Response • Community response in creating alternatives and attacking these problems as varied as the participants (researchers, editors, publishers, librarians, etc.) • Needs are varied, but deeply interrelated. • All recognize the need for change, and numerous independent efforts to address the issues from a variety of angles are underway, including: • Creating competition (SPARC initiatives: Creating new lower-cost alternatives to high prices journals - Organic Letters, Journal of Logic Programming, etc.

5. Community Response • Supporting not-for-profit publishers (Project Euclid - Cornell/Duke effort; Crop Science Society/HighWire; BioOne (AIBS/BTP/SPARC/KU/Allen Press) • Distributing peer reviewed work for free (PubMed Central, E-BioSci, BioMed Central, Public Library of Science) • Developing & linking e-print archives (Open Archives Initiative, E-Scholarship, D-Space) • Creating new community models (Columbia Earthscape, MIT CogNet) • These have experienced varying degrees of of success; those that seem to be thriving are those that emphasize collaboration with all players in the scholarly communications community

6. One Collaborative Initiative: BioOne BioOne is an effort to mount a direct and sustainable discipline-specific (Biological Sciences) response to these conditions. Goal is to build a new, cooperative electronic publishing venture, whose operating structure and business model is both technically and financially viable for both the academic publishing community and the library community. Initially, BioOne is a richly linked, database of high quality journals representing wide cross-section of biological sciences

7. Collaboration: Organization/Status • Founding organizations represent broad constituencies: American Institute of Biological Sciences, Big Twelve Plus Library Consortium, SPARC, University of Kansas and Allen Press • Active volunteer Board of Directors and Working Group, appointed by founders, represent library and society interests to ensure collaborative development • Established non-profit corporation; 501(c)(3) tax-exempt with a paid staff of one and half; active vendor contract partnerships - OCLC and Amigos

8. Collaboration: Strategy • BioOne provides unique opportunity for realistic collaboration; participants can actively change the current scholarly communications process by creating a different publishing model together • Unique aspect of BioOne is that collaboration is not at committee level; but rather at business level. • Principals address economics of publishing from three perspectives (creator, purchaser and end user)

9. Collaboration: Serves Dual Constituencies • Provides societies: inexpensive access to new platform (SGML/PDF conversion, opportunities for financially independence, potential to reach wider audience, realistic collaboration (societies & libraries), and creates template for other disciplines to replicate - wider collaboration = wider use • Provides libraries: cost-efficient acquisition of e-journals unbundled from print, strong digital preservation role, consortial experience, active role in developing license agreement, and role of business partner to help change the scholarly communications process by creating a different publishing model

10. Cost Effective: Business Model: Cost Recovery/Diversify/Sustain • Cost-Recovery based Model; non-profit, objective is to recover costs while ensuring sustainability • Revenue sharing pool for publishers; 50% of subscription income; Allocation based on combination of hits and page count (independently audited) • 501 c 3 organization - books open • Organization structured to keep operating expenses low; outsourcing and strategic partnerships brokered wherever possible • Pricing model for libraries based on flexible, tiered FTE band structure

11. Cost Effective: Business Model • Committed to exploration of multiple revenue streams • Intention is to build model not entirely dependent on single revenue source • Site sponsorships, advertising, distribution arrangements, spin-off products/services • Eventual diversification of revenue streams should allow for moderation in subscription prices; sustainability depends on it

12. Specific Project Approach BioOne successfully launched as scheduled April 2, 2001 with 40 peer reviewed, high impact titles. As of May 22, the database has grown to encompass: • Publishers: 45 • Journals: 55 • Volumes: 275 • Issues: 644 • Articles: 12,344 • Pages: 104,599 • Authors: 33,027 • Figures: 79,854 • Tables: 18,756 Complete, fully updated title list available on the BioOne web site (www.bioone.org)

13. BioOne 2001 Project Results • Because of initial adoption of technology standards, database was richly linked at launch (value to researchers and library customers) • Link resolver dynamically generates links to wide array of sources: bibliographic databases, citation resolvers, A & I Services, secondary data sources • Arrangements in place with PubMed, Medline, CrossRef, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, and NBII; also arrangements in progress with: JSTOR,BIOSIS, CABI, and more. • Arrangements made with specific provisions for reciprocity and revenue neutrality wherever possible

14. 2001 Results

15. 2001 Results

16. 2001 Results • Revenue sharing pool for publishers; 50% of net sales receipts to societies (subscription income); Allocation to each society based on combination of hits and page count (independently audited). • First year subscribers totaled ~400, mainly academic research libraries individually or within consortia. • First year online user base totaled ~3,100,000 scholars, students, researchers and practitioners. A material portion of the subscriber base is from outside of the United States. • First year sales (April-December 2001), net sales receipts totaled $957,355, of which 50% ($478,678) is being shared with all titles in the 2001 database.

17. Looking Ahead in 2002 • Already added 10 additional titles; emphasis on expanding content areas, and including non-US based content. • Content addition based on careful planned growth strategy; intention is add titles at staggered pace, at rate that tracks with subscription increases • Accomplishes two goals: Helps keep revenue pool from being diluted, and helps keep prices steady for library constituency. • New types of content to be added in Spring, including first e-book (electronic text project with the American Society for Plant Biology, text book on Arabidopsis, fully linked to relevant genome databases.

18. Looking Ahead to 2002 • Exploring opportunities for funding/experimentation with back issue conversions • MacArthur Foundation Special Funding Initiative onLong-Term Intellectual Property Protection • Exploring Opportunities for experimentation with Open Access module • Soros Foundation Open Society Institute, Budapest Open Access Initiative, www.soros.org/openaccess • Public Library of Science -www.publiclibraryofscience.org • PubMedCentral - www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov

19. Looking Ahead to 2002 • Further linking arrangements, enhancements to database • Developing plans to enhance link resolver and to apply technology to other article elements (I.e. species name resolution) • Exploration of taxonomic/keyword overlay for BioOne to help create subject specific sub-collections on the BioOne site • Addition of suite of author and editor tools: electronic manuscript submission and peer-review software toolkits • Development of corporate marketing strategy - article by article sales • Exploring opportunities for potential partnerships: • IMSL • BioLine • Exploring opportunities for funding/experimentation with back issue conversions Open access,etc. BOAI

20. Looking Ahead to 2002 • Exploring opportunities for potential partnerships to help expand content • IMSL • BioLine (NSF International Digital Libraries Program) • Enhancing communication with Publishing partners to communicate these and other opportunities • Listserve continuation and expansion • Regular participation in publishing community and scientific community meetings (approx. 20 in 200) • Consideration of meeting co-sponsored by AIBS,SPARC and BioOne

21. Contact Us • Goal is to build new cooperative operating and business model that works for both non-commercial publishers and library community. Talk to us if: • You have a journal that should be included in the collection; • You are interested in access to the collection • You are interested in finding out more about ways to effect change in the current scholarly communications environment. Heather Joseph, BioOne 21 Dupont Circle, Stuite 800 Washington, DC 20036 202-296-2296 heather@arl.org www.bioone.org