ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


652 / C&RL News ■ N ovem ber 2003

SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

An update on the BioOne electronic publishing initiative

by H eather Joseph and A d ria n  W. A lexander

I n April 2001, a unique coalition o f aca­dem ic librarians and scientific societies 
launched a new  electronic journal aggrega­
tion, B io O n e .1 It took two full years o f col­
la b o ra tio n , c o m m o n  p u rp o se , an d  hard 
w ork to m ake B io O n e a real product with 
high-quality scholarly content, an outstand­
ing tech nical platform, and hundreds o f in­
stitutional subscribers. Tw o years and a few 
months after the launch, it’s w orth a look 
back  to see how  far w e ’ve com e and how  
w e got here.

D e v e lo p m e n t an d  o rg a n iz a tio n
B io O n e represents the collective effort and 
financial com m itm ent o f five founding or­
ganizations:

• T he A m erican Institute o f B iological 
Scien ces (AIBS), com prised o f 88  m em ber 
societies and related organizations;2

• SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and 
Academic Resources Coalition, with over 200 
m em ber libraries and affiliated organizations 
around the w orld;3

• Allen Press, a com m ercial p roducer o f 
over 300 print and electronic scholarly jour­
nals;'*

• T he University o f Kansas, a com pre­
hensive public university that has assumed 
a national leadership role in scholarly com ­

m unication issues over the past five years;5
• T he G reater W estern Library Allianc

a consortium  o f 30 research libraries in the 
w estern h alf o f the United States.6

Tw o years before the launch, these or­
ganizations saw an opportunity to address 
two critical need s in the scholarly com m u­
nication process: an academ y-based alter­
native for the electronic publishing o f jou r­
nals by scholarly societies that lacked the 
financial and tech nical resources to b eco m e 
electro n ic pu blishers, and the continuing 
n eed  for academ ic libraries to acquire high- 
quality scientific literature at a m ore rea­
son able cost. Involving a group o f societies 
such as those represented  by AIBS provided 
an opportunity to create an aggregation o f 
scholarly electronic journals that w ere simi­
lar in su bject content.

O ver the follow ing m onths, con sensu s 
for building the database was developed  in 
the library com munity, through SPARC, and 
in th e  s o c i e t y  p u b lis h in g  c o m m u n ity , 
through AIBS and Allen Press. A “working 
group” o f key personnel from the five found­
ing organizations was form ed to begin writ­
ing a business plan for the enterprise, and 
a nonbinding m em orandum  o f understand­
ing was signed by the founding organiza­
tions in Ju n e  1999- B io O n e was in corp o ­

e, 

About th e  authors
Heather Joseph is president o f  BioOne, Inc., e-mail: heather@ esuhbou ttrohtaAarl.org, and Adrian W. Alexander is executive director o f  the 
Greater Western Library Alliance, e-mail: alexander@lindahall.org

© 2003 Heather Joseph, Adrian W. Alexander

Two years after the launch

mailto:heather@arl.org


C&RL News ■ N o v e m b e r 2003 /  653

rated in Washington, D.C., in August of that 
year. A board of directors was elected, with 
each founding organization holding two 
voting seats on the board.

In August 2000, the BioO ne Board of 
Directors hired Heather Joseph as president 
and chief operating officer. She came to 
BioOne with extensive experience in schol­
arly publishing and, currently, also serves 
as president-elect o f the Society for Schol­
arly Publishing. Joseph is the only full-time 
paid staff member at BioOne, so the enter­
prise is highly dependent on its founding 
organizations for operational support. For 
example:

• The main office of BioOne, Inc., is at 
the SPARC headquarters in Washington, D.C. 
Office and fiscal support services are pro­
vided by SPARC and its parent organiza­
tion, the Association of Research Libraries 
(ARL), and one of SPARC’s business con­
sultants, Howard Goldstein, has provided 
invaluable business development support 
to the project since its inception.

• Allen Press is B ioO n e’s “production 
shop,” where articles are SGML-encoded, 
linked, and indexed.

• The University o f Kansas hosts the 
BioOne database on one o f its servers in 
Law rence, Kansas, in order to provide 
Internet 2 access to the journals.

B io O n e also outsources its sales and 
marketing operations to two other organi­
zations. Amigos Library Services,7 based in 
Dallas, Texas, represents the company in 
the United States and Canada. Elsewhere in 
the world, BioOne is now represented by 
Cambridge Scientific Abstracts.8

A d v is o ry  groups
BioO ne’s management and strategic direc­
tion is supported by three important advi­
sory groups: publisher, library, and techni­
cal. The publisher advisory group helps in 
identifying and recruiting appropriate pri­
mary journal content for the BioOne data­
base, recommending appropriate linking ar­
rangements (betw een B ioO ne and other 
journal collections, citation resolvers, A&I 
services, and other related resources such 
as taxonom ic databases), recommending 
participation in digital preservation projects, 
and recommending mechanisms that pro­
vide the appropriate level of access restric­

tion for material contained in the BioOne 
database.

BioOne draws on the expertise of the 
technical advisory group to ensure that it 
continues to conform to industry standards 
in all areas. This group also provides ad­
vice on key issues, such as architecture and 
new system developments, linking mecha­
nisms between citations of digital works and 
the works them selves, standards, digital 
archiving, access management, discovery 
and retrieval (including metadata), and tech­
nical and other issues associated with help­
ing users gain authorized access to net­
worked information, such as identification, 
authentication, and authorization issues.

The library advisory board makes rec­
ommendations on pricing issues, such as 
balancing adequate revenue for the pub­
lishers and continued system development 
with reasonable pricing for libraries, licens­
ing terms and conditions, interface devel­
opment to better present content to end 
users, and ways to improve existing func­
tionality and develop additional functional­
ity to best meet end-user needs.

Business m o d e l
BioOne’s greatest challenge in its initial plan­
ning stages was how to acquire over $1 mil­
lion in development funds. Grant funding 
was sought and both cash and in-kind con­
tributions were pledged by the founding or­
ganizations, as w ell as other interested 
groups. Ten provosts from universities in 
the Big 12 Athletic Conference, for example, 
contributed $50,000 from their own bud­
gets. It is important to note that the largest 
amount of cash support, by far, came from 
the academic library community and, more 
specifically, from the SPARC membership.

In the fall o f 1999, SPARC launched a 
solicitation effort among its 180 member li­
braries, asking them to contribute between 
$1,000 and $5,000 each in charter support 
(based on materials budget size), and an 
optional $5,000 in sponsor support from 
funding alread y earm arked  to support 
SPARC initiatives. In return, these libraries 
would receive discounts on their BioOne 
subscriptions for each of the first five years 
o f participation. At launch, 127 libraries had 
provided financial support totaling over 
$750,000.



654 /  C&RL News ■ N o ve m b e r 2003

BioO ne’s business model was developed 
with the aim o f building and maintaining a 
cooperative operating and financial struc­
ture that would simultaneously meet the 
needs of noncommercial scholarly publish­
ers, libraries, and the scientists and students 
who create and use the scholarly informa­
tion published in its journals.

To accomplish that goal, the business 
model had to be highly cost-effective and 
sustainable. It also had to be priced at a 
point that would be attractive to libraries, 
but w hich would also provide scholarly 
societies with adequate revenue. The work­
ing group determined early on that a criti­
cal mass of at least 30 journals would be 
necessary to provide enough value to the 
market to generate sufficient revenue to 
sustain and expand the enterprise. When 
the product was launched in April 2001, it 
included 40 scholarly journals in whole-or- 
ganism biology, ecology, and environmen­
tal sciences.

From the outset, the BioOne founding 
partners agreed that as much revenue as 
possible from subscription sales should go 
directly to the societies that had chosen to 
publish electronically through us. Since the 
first day o f paid access, one half o f gross 
subscription revenue has gone directly to 
the publishers at the end of each subscrip­
tion year. The amount each publisher re­
ceives is based on a formula that takes into 
account the number of pages each title has 
in the database and how many hits the title 
received during the previous subscription 
year.

In 2002, the average journal received just 
over $8,500 in revenue from sales through 
the BioOne database, which was equiva­
lent to 52 subscriptions o f the print version 
o f the average BioOne journal. The highest 
paid journal in 2002 received  just over 
$35,000 from BioOne.

C u rre n t sta tu s
When BioOne ended its second full sub­
scrip tion  y ear on March 31, 2003, the 
BioOne founding partners could be proud 
o f what they had accomplished only four 
years after their initial discussions. The da­
tabase now contains 68 scholarly journals 
and one electronic book published by 56 
scientific societies and other related orga­

nizations. Over 400 libraries around the 
world (mostly at colleges and universities) 
provide BioOne access to over 3.5 million 
scholars, students, researchers, and other 
practitioners.

New developments at BioOne include the 
hosting of a small group of Open Access 
journals, such as the University o f Arizona’s 
J o u r n a l  o f  I n s e c t  S c ie n c e . B io O n e  also 
works with PubMed Central to create com­
patible files for publishers who request this 
service and delivers them directly to that 
organization’s database for free access.

As a scholarly publishing innovator, 
BioOne is committed to keeping abreast of 
emerging trends in scholarly communica­
tion and to collaborating with new partners 
when that cooperation can further BioO ne’s 
mission.

In the summer of 2003, BioOne began 
participating in the World Health Organi­
zation’s HINARI program, which provides 
institutions in less-developed countries with 
free access to BioOne. As o f July 1, 2003, 
481 institutions in 52 countries had access 
to BioOne via this program.

F u tu re  ch alleng es
B ioO ne’s central aim has always been to 
establish a robust, reliable source for cost- 
effective electronic access to the full text of 
primary journals. Established jointly by the 
library and publishing communities, BioOne 
set out to support noncommercial publish­
ers who lacked sufficient resources to make 
the leap to online publishing and to sup­
port their transition from print-based to elec­
tronic publishing. This directly served the 
library community’s interest by preserving 
its ability to continue to provide high-qual- 
ity scientific literature at a reasonable cost. 
All of BioO ne’s partners agreed that other 
options available at the time— remaining pa- 
per-based and facing slow but inevitable 
irrelevance or the sale/license of content to 
commercial publishers and facing inevitable 
large increases in subscription costs— were 
unacceptable.

By launching on schedule and with the 
content prom ised to library supporters, 
BioOne rapidly moved beyond being per­
ceived by the scholarly community (librar­
ians and publishers alike) as an experimen­
tal, potentially risky endeavor to being re­



C&RL News ■  N o v e m b e r 2003 /  655

garded as a sound alternative for publish­
ers in need o f an online platform and as a 
primary source of journal access for librar­
ians. This rapid acceptance resulted in some 
interesting implications for BioOne, some 
intended and some not. Rapid acceptance 
allowed new sales and renewals to proceed 
apace, and also allowed content recruitment 
to quickly becom e a fairly routine proce­
dure, proceeding at a faster pace than ini­
tially expected. However, as librarians have 
come to accept that BioOne will provide 
reliable and ongoing access to electronic 
journals, they are much more comfortable 
with dropping corresponding print subscrip­
tions to the journals contained in the data­
base.

BioOne publishers had initially seen only 
a small number o f cancellations of their 
print subscriptions after the database be­
came operational. Two years later, however, 
they began to hear from more and more 
libraries that their print journals were being 
cancelled in favor of electronic access via 
the BioOne database. In fact, 75 percent of 
ARL members indicated in a May 2003 sur­
vey that they intend to cut print subscrip­
tions in cases where they hold both print 
and electronic versions of a journal.

One o f the consequences o f growing 
from 40 titles in 2001 to 68 titles currently is 
that the revenue-sharing “pie” (which has 
not grown nearly as rapidly) must be cut 
into considerably more slices in order to 
pay more content providers. Therefore, rev­
enue per publisher is declining simultaneous 
to publishers learning that cancellations of

Statement of ownership and management
College & Research Libraries N ew s is p ub lished 11 
times a year (m onthly, com bining July/August) by the 
Am erican Library A sso ciation , 5 0  E. Huron St., Chi­
cag o , IL 6 0 6 11 . Am erican Library Association, ow ner; 
Steph anie O rphan, editor. Secon d -class po stage paid 
at Chicago, Illinois. Printed in th e U.S.A. As a nonprofit 
organization authorized to m ail at special rates (DMM 
Section 423 .1 2 ), the purposes, function, and nonprofit 
status o f  this organization  and th e ex em p t status for 
fed eral in co m e tax p u rp o ses, have n ot ch an g ed  dur­
ing th e p reced in g  12 m onths.

E x ten t and nature o f  c ircu la tio n . ( “A v e r­
a g e ” figures d e n o te th e n um ber o f  c o p ie s  printed 
each  issue during th e p reced in g  tw elve m onths; “Ac­
tu al” figures d e n o te th e n u m b er o f co p ies o f  single 
issues published nearest to filing d ate.) Total n u m b e r  
o f  copies (n e t press ru n ): Average, 1 3 , l 6 l ;  Actual,

print subscriptions are increasing. Thus far 
those cancellations have not come anywhere 
close to offsetting the additional revenue 
publishers have realized from the BioOne 
database, but the growing concern about this 
trend among BioOne publishers is palpable.

BioOne’s new challenge is to find a way 
to make the switch from providing our par­
ticipating societies with incremental income 
to providing them with some level of re­
placement income from print cuts in order 
for these societies to keep publishing their 
content. This challenge represents a shift in 
BioO ne’s mission and business model, and 
is the single largest challenge in defining 
how BioOne will move forward as a col­
laborative enterprise. BioOne is working ac­
tively with its publishing partners to help 
them meet this challenge. Most significantly, 
SPARC has commissioned an in-depth eco­
nomic review of the financial models of a 
representative cross-section of the publish­
ers participating in BioOne.

Notes
1. BioOne, Inc., www.bioone.org.
2. The American Institute of Biological 

Sciences, www.aibs.org.
3. Scholarly Publishing and Academic 

Resources Coalition, www.arl.org/sparc.
4. Allen Press, www.allenpress.com.
5. University of Kansas, www.ku.edu.
6. The Greater Western Library Alliance, 

www.gwla.org.
7. Amigos library Services, www.amigos.org.
8. C am brid ge S c ie n tific  A b stracts, 

www.csa.com. ■

13,2 3 1 . Total p a id /r e q u e s te d  subscriptions: Average, 
12,623; Actual, 12,728. Sales through dealers a n d  carri­
ers, street vendors, c o u n te r  sales, a n d  o th e r non-USPS 
p a id  d istrib u tio n : n ot ap p licab le. O ther classes m a ile d  
th ro u g h  th e  USPS: n o t ap p licab le. Total p a i d  a n d /o r  
requested circulation: A verage, 12,623; Actual, 12,728. 
Free d istrib u tio n  by m ail: Average, 73; Actual, 93- Free 
d istrib u tio n  o u tsid e th e m ail: Average, 0; Actual, 0. 
Total f r e e  d istrib u tio n : Average, 73; Actual, 93. Total 
d istrib u tio n : Average, 12,6 9 6 ; Actual, 12,8 2 1 . Copies 
n o t d istrib u ted : O ffice use, leftov er, spoiled : Average, 
46 5 ; Actual, 410. Total (s u m  o f  p rev io u s entries): Aver­
ag e, 1 3 ,l 6 l ;  Actual, 13,231. P e rce n t p a i d  a n d /o r  re­
q u ested  circu la tio n : A verage, 99.43% ; Actual, 99.28% .

Statement o f  ow n ersh ip, managem ent, and 
circulation (PS Form  3 526, O c to b e r 1 9 9 9 ) fo r 2003 
filed  with th e United States Postal Serv ice, Postm aster 
in C hicago, Illin ois, O c to b e r 14, 2003.

http://www.bioone.org
http://www.aibs.org
http://www.arl.org/sparc
http://www.allenpress.com
http://www.ku.edu
http://www.gwla.org
http://www.amigos.org
http://www.csa.com