Re: 2006 BioOne Progress Report Now Available

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

I was delighted to hear about BioOne's "commitment to evolve to 
better meet the needs of its stake-holders," but I would be 
interested to learn as well about the fortunes of one subgroup of 
stakeholders, the shareholders, which, in BioOne's case, are 
principally professional societies.

What portion of their operating expenses are offset by the income 
from BioOne?  How does this compare to, say, three years ago and 
how is it forecast to evolve three years from now?  If there are 
print as well as online editions, what is the expected future 
(and profitability) of the print editions?

If in time a publication evolved such that its only edition were 
electronic, available exclusively through BioOne, would the 
revenue from BioOne be sufficient to offset the publication's 
expenses?  If not, is the professional society prepared to 
subsidize the BioOne edition indefinitely?  If the expectation is 
to derive revenue through an Open Access model (as some 
participating publishers apparently do now), how is that revenue 
forecast to increase and at what time will it exceed the 
operating costs of any particular publication?

In other words, what is the longer-term plan?

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lauren Kane" <lauren@arl.org>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2007 4:56 PM
Subject: 2006 BioOne Progress Report Now Available

> 2006 BioOne Progress Report Now Available
> Washington, DC (February 8, 2007)
>
> At an average cost to subscribing institutions of $0.75 per 
> full-text download, BioOne remains one of the highest quality, 
> lowest cost options for electronic access to current content. A 
> complete report detailing BioOne's evolution last year is now 
> available in the 2006 BioOne Progress Report at 
> http://www.bioone.org/pdf/ BioOne06ProgressRpt.pdf. This 
> publicly available report illustrates BioOne's increasing 
> relevance and value to the scholarly community as an 
> alternative, not-for-profit online publisher.  In addition to 
> describing past and present activities and achievements, the 
> report highlights BioOne's continued commitment to evolve to 
> better meet the needs of its stake-holders.
>
> BioOne is now home to 125 publications from 91 publishers 
> across three collections: BioOne.1, BioOne.2, and Open Access. 
> Paid subscribers at the end of 2006 included nearly 1,000 
> global institutions and organizations, plus many hundreds more 
> accessing through no or low cost developing world programs. 
> BioOne registered over 5.9 million hits in 2006 to abstracts 
> and full-texts, with at least 258,000 unique visitors to the 
> site each month.
>
> ###
>
> About BioOne
>
> Established in 2000, BioOne is the product of innovative 
> collaboration between scientific societies, libraries, academe, 
> and the private sector, who seek a sustainable, mission-driven 
> alternative to commercial publishing. BioOne brings to the Web 
> a uniquely valuable aggregation of the full-texts of 
> high-impact bioscience research journals. Most of BioOne's 
> titles are published by small societies and not-for-profit 
> publishers. BioOne provides integrated, cost-effective access 
> to a thoroughly linked information resource of interrelated 
> journals focused on the biological, ecological, and 
> environmental sciences.
>
> ###