In this Issue:
2020 Ambassador Award Nominations Now Open
Nominations are now open for the 2020 BioOne Ambassador Award! This award recognizes early career authors dedicated to communicating the importance and impact of their research to the public. BioOne is honored to showcase the talent of the newest generation of researchers.
Current BioOne publishing partners are able to nominate rising scholars contributing to their journals who meet the following criteria:
- be a current graduate student, or are within five years of having completed a graduate degree (e.g., Master’s, Ph.D.)
- have published an article in an active BioOne Complete journal in 2019
Nominees will be invited to submit a short response to the question, What are the broader implications of your work, and how does your work impact the public at large?
You can see the 2018 and 2019 Ambassador Award Winners, or catch up with inaugural Ambassador Award Winner Kalhari Bandara Goonewardene, PhD in this blog post on the BioOne Career Center. Read her initial short response to BioOne’s question of the broader implications of her work which she submitted for the 2018 Award.
To get more information about nominating an emerging scholar for the 2020 Ambassador Award or to learn about 2018 and 2019 winners, visit our Ambassador Award page. Nominations due February 21, 2020.
Introducing BioOne Team 2020
Over the past 20 years, BioOne has grown its collections, international reach, and return to publishers exponentially. You might be surprised, however, to learn that we have achieved this growth with a small staff and by outsourcing to a select group of excellent partners.
Heather Joseph was her own force for the first critical years. When I joined in 2005, there were two of us. A year later, we were three. For many years we were five. Now, for the first time in its history, BioOne is guided by the expertise of eight professionals. It is an honor to introduce you to BioOne Team 2020.
Internally, there are two teams headed by Director of Marketing and Sales Christine Orr and Director of Technology and Operations Michael Di Natale.
Christine came aboard sporting rocket-propelled track shoes during August 2019, and jumped into preparations to bring our sales activities under the BioOne roof by January. Christine has honed her skills at top industry societies and enterprises, most recently at Ringgold. On her team are BioOne’s North American Sales Manager Chelsea Tharp and Marketing Communications Associate Katie Kaefer, who both joined in January this year. Chelsea will be a familiar face to many librarians, for she has skillfully represented BioOne’s collection for the past six years through our external sales partner. Katie comes to the team from the American Historical Association, and sports both impressive marketing experience and stellar organizational abilities.
Michael, who joined BioOne in 2017, has been the force behind our transition to the new platform. As he continues as tech leader, Michael also lends his creativity and insight to both strategic and business operations. Michael’s team includes newly-promoted Library Services Associate Caroline Breul, who is already shoulder-deep digging into the analytics and technology crucial to serving our library community’s needs. Caroline has been a vital member of BioOne since 2017 and is now pursuing on an MLIS. Publisher Relations Associate Alexandra Vieux Frankel came aboard in August last year with a graduate degree in Anthropology plus publishing experience. She is quickly forming strong relationships with our community of publishers.
BioOne’s most recent arrival is Program Assistant Hillary Liu. Far from a rookie, Hillary is impressively proficient in Mandarin, Arabic, and Spanish, and brings research experience from working in defense and national security settings.
Although everyone who has worked to make BioOne a success has come from diverse backgrounds, each has shared a deep commitment to sustainably serve scholarly communication in the biosciences. BioOne’s Team 2020 stands tall, firmly supported by the shoulders of giants.
SUSAN SKOMAL, Ph.D.
President/CEO
New Content Now Available
BioOne Complete welcomed back four journals from the Entomological Society of America on January 1:
- Annals of the Entomological Society of America
v.93 – Current - Environmental Entomology
v.29 – Current - Journal of Economic Entomology
v.93 – Current - Journal of Medical Entomology
v.37 – Current
BioOne Complete also added 6 new titles to our Open Access collection on January 1:
- Air, Soil and Water Research
SAGE, v.1 – Current - Environmental Health Insights
SAGE, v.1 – Current - International Journal of Insect Science
SAGE, v.1 – Current - Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery Open Reports
SAGE, v.1 – Current - Tropical Conservation Science
SAGE, v.1 – Current - Revue suisse de Zoologie
Muséum d’histoire naturelle, Genève, 2015 – Current
This wealth of new content further enhances BioOne Complete’s subject coverage in entomology, zoology, environmental sciences, and more. Returning titles will fill gaps in their archive, to include all issues from 2000—present. View all journals in BioOne Complete.
MIT Libraries Framework for Publisher Contracts: BioOne Responds
BioOne and the library community share the common goal of enduring and sustainable access to high-quality research publications, and we have always aimed to balance the needs of all stakeholders as we set policies and develop our publications platform.
The MIT Libraries Framework for Publisher Contracts outlines key stipulations in alignment with their goals of fair and sustainable publisher pricing and preservation of scholarly communities’ control over their own output. Since its release in 2019, the framework has been endorsed by more than 150 US-based libraries and such major library consortia as NERL, GWLA, and VIVA—three major groups that license BioOne Complete on behalf of their member institutions.
Because the MIT Libraries Framework serves as a guide for so many of our library partners, BioOne would like to clarify our stance on each point. For example, BioOne has made it a priority to provide responses to the following important points:
- No author will be required to waive any institutional or funder open access policy to publish in any of the publisher’s journals.
- No author will be required to relinquish copyright, but instead will be provided with options that enable publication while also providing authors with generous reuse rights.
As an aggregator, BioOne represents more than 150 publishers, each of which sets its own author-facing policies. Thus, although BioOne is not in a position to mandate policies for its independent publishing partners, we support the Framework by accommodating open access content as well as by having commissioned an author-focused Model Publication Agreement that is available to everyone.
- Publishers will ensure the long-term digital preservation and accessibility of their content through participation in trusted digital archives.
BioOne is a participant in both LOCKSS and Portico to provide comprehensive archiving and preservation of all included content. Our participation in these projects also protects the BioOne aggregation in the case of a trigger event or catastrophic failure. Scientific content is relevant for the ages, and BioOne considers it essential that we play a role in long-term archiving.
- Institutions will pay a fair and sustainable price to publishers for value-added services, based on transparent and cost-based pricing models.
This is perhaps the most meaningful to consider, as sustainability is central to BioOne’s mission. We are dedicated to the sustainability of independent society publishers, while also providing cost-effective access to libraries.
In addition, BioOne commissioned a practical perspective on open-access mandates and an analytic framework for assessing the potential effect of these mandates on subscription revenue. These are free to download and include a: risk assessment model and substitution risk model for publishers considering OA options.
BioOne’s unique business model returns precious library subscription funds to societies, and allows us to maintain a content platform, which meets the evolving demands of both librarians and researchers. Services include value-added tools for discoverability such as deposition of DOIs to Crossref and indexing with nearly 20 partners; library evaluation of the collection via COUNTER-compliant usage statistics and a comprehensive Institutional Administration Dashboard; and researcher support via a mobile-friendly site, a Google Translate feature, errata and citation alerts, and conversion of publisher content to fully-functional XML. Library support also makes it possible for us to participate in Research4Life, delivering key ecological, agricultural, and biological research available at no cost to more than 80 nations.
“Since its inception, BioOne has offered a ‘transformative agreement’,” commented Susan Skomal President and CEO of BioOne. “This organization was created to address the inequities of commercial publishing. As an aggregation it is possible to present our publishers’ content to the world on a first-class platform that they might not otherwise be able to afford. After two decades, we continue to respond to the needs of our library constituents outlined in the MIT Framework.”
For more information on BioOne’s policies for libraries, please reach out to christine@bioone.org.
Upcoming Conferences
Visit our booth at any of the following conferences, or email us at team@bioone.org to make an appointment. We’d love to see you!
March
Electronic Research and Libraries (ER & L), March 8-11, Austin, TX, USA
SCELCapalooza, March 10-13, Los Angeles, CA, USA
National Shellfisheries Association, March 29-April 2, Baltimore, MD, USA
UKSG, March 30-April 1, Brighton, UK
