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Re: 2006 BioOne Progress Report Now Available

I meant to post this to the list, but mistakenly hit "reply" instead of "reply all." Sorry. Susan deserves her kudos.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>
To: "Susan Skomal" <susan@arl.org>
Sent: Monday, February 12, 2007 4:58 PM
Subject: Re: 2006 BioOne Progress Report Now Available

I regard Susan Skomal's comment to be a model of its kind.

This remark in particular makes everything credible: "BioOne may not be a good fit for all non-profit journals in our field." And a good fit for others--balanced, thoughtful, non-absolutist. Refreshing!

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Susan Skomal" <susan@arl.org>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Monday, February 12, 2007 3:32 PM
Subject: Re: 2006 BioOne Progress Report Now Available

Joe:

Thank you very much for responding to our 2006 Progress Report and for raising these timely questions - issues that BioOne is indeed working actively to resolve. A significant part of BioOne's operating philosophy is to be as transparent as possible about our experience, including frank statements of lessons learned and adjustments we must make as the scholarly publishing environment evolves. We thus welcome your questions and hope that discussion of our experience will be beneficial to the enterprise of non-profit scholarly publishing more broadly.

For those unfamiliar with BioOne's business model, by contractual agreement we return 50% of all subscription revenue earned to our participating publishers. We are pleased to report, however, that for each of the past three years BioOne has returned an increasingly greater percentage. In fact, 61% of the total sales revenue was distributed to publishers for 2005, and we are hoping to top that from 2006 earnings.

Because BioOne does not have detailed information about the operating expenses of its publishers, I'm not able to answer directly the questions you've posed. We are, however, now in the process - with the cooperation of our publishers - of completing a thorough analysis on an completely confidential basis of the subscription and financial trajectories of our titles in the five years prior to joining BioOne as compared with the years they've participated in the collection. Our goal is to determine what cohort of titles is best served by participation, and the pricing levels that are needed to provide sustainable revenues on a primary (rather than incremental) basis. This is a continuation and extension of the work begun in 2004, referenced in the Progress Report (pp.1-2), which represented a fundamental shift in BioOne's original business model.

Over its six-year evolution, we have learned that BioOne may not be a good fit for all non-profit journals in our field. For a great many titles in organismal and integrative biology, BioOne's model now generates sufficient revenue to offset the loss of income from subscription sales to single institutions, whether print or online. I submit, moreover, that the issue is no longer print versus electronic, but what might be termed traditional single-title subscriptions versus aggregated sales. Pricing adjustments made following the 2004 study were helpful in this respect - and it is important to note that these increases were understood and supported by the library community, as is indicated by our continued renewal rate of ca. 99%. We are extremely grateful for this support.

For titles with very large and stable traditional subscription sales, however, BioOne may not be an appropriate choice. We now routinely generate multi-year revenue projections for titles interested in joining BioOne to help them evaluate the financial effects of so doing, and we discuss frankly with prospective publishers the issues they should consider before making a decision.

BioOne's mission is to create an alternative publishing model that is sustainable for non-profit publishers and libraries alike, both of which are facing significant and related challenges. This involves balancing the needs of both. We are not in the business of asking scholarly societies to subsidize BioOne; neither do we expect libraries to subsidize revenue- maximizing publishing strategies. Rather, we work with congenial non-profit publishers and academic libraries to develop a sustainable, scalable, and (we hope) replicable publishing model.

With respect to Open Access, BioOne does not derive revenue from its OA publications and does not return royalties. As part of our mission to promote the scholarly enterprise, we are eager to expand the number of OA titles we publish, and are now working to reduce costs to encourage more OA titles to join BioOne - again, titles for whom an OA model makes sense. But we are also acutely aware that a broader solution to the economics of Open Access publishing is much needed if OA is to become a sustainable compliment to scholarly publishing supported by subscription sales. To this end, BioOne has likewise begun to investigate creative models.

BioOne would be honored if you and other similarly active and concerned members of the scholarly publishing community would attend its upcoming Publishers and Partners Meeting, April 11, in the DC area. This event is an opportunity to explore the common goals of our libraries and society/non-profit publishers, with a view to helping map the longer-term plan you reference. For information, please see http://www.bioone.org/perlserv/?request=3Dget-static&name=3Dget-news#meeting.

Susan Skomal, Ph.D.

Executive Director
BioOne
21 Dupont Circle
Washington, DC 20036
Tel: 202-296-2296
Cell: 301-613-8736
Fax: 202-872-0884
susan@arl.org