Re: 2006 BioOne Progress Report Now Available

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

The BioOne model is also incompatible with open access. What it 
share with Green OA is the sensitivity to subscribers being 
willing to continue the print subscriptions.  Many librarians, 
including myself, maintained print subscriptions (they were 
mostly inexpensive) in order to help BioOne, sometimes as a 
response to personal appeals--but no publisher can count on that 
kind of subsidy continuing.

Besides such support from libraries, many of their titles owe 
their survival to the demand for member print subscriptions. I 
would expect this to decline over time with the age-related 
changes in membership.

The rational way for publishing most of the titles on their list 
as the need for print decreases is directly and inexpensively by 
individual university departments or museums. Some of the titles 
are already sponsored in this fashion.  Whether BioOne can make 
this transition remains to be seen.  It is one of the unfortunate 
paradoxes that some of the small journals that could technically 
make the easiest change to OA may be among the last to do so.

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
dgoodman@princeton.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>
Date: Friday, February 9, 2007 6:36 pm
Subject: Re: 2006 BioOne Progress Report Now Available
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu

> 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.