Eighteen months after its successful proposal to the innovative European collaborative Knowledge Exchange, BioOne is delighted to report that one of Knowledge Exchange’s four partner countries has reached its funding target, allowing for BioOne availability to all academic institutions in The Netherlands.
Following a lengthy proposal process culminating in Fall of 2007, BioOne was pleased to by selected by as one of five publishers to collaborate with Knowledge Exchange with the goal of a creating a new licensing model and access strategy that would further the dissemination of scholarly and scientific content. Knowledge Exchange (KE) is a collaboration among four national library consortia: Denmark’s Electronic Research Library (DEFF), the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC, UK), and the SURF foundation (SURF, NL).
The essential structure of BioOne’s proposal was simple: to encourage institutions in each of the four partner countries to participate in Knowledge Exchange by offering tiered discounts. The greater the participation, the lower the cost for all involved. The ultimate goal for each partner country was to reach a target funding level sufficient to trigger a national site license. BioOne further suggested that for any partner country achieving its national site license target, BioOne would provide access to every citizen and resident of that country via IP geolocation.
BioOne and KE’s common goal over the next two years is to BioOne recognized from the onset that its aims were resonant with Knowledge Exchange, laying the foundation for a successful partnership. Founded as a collaboration between libraries and not-for-profit scientific publishers, BioOne’s mission has always been to create a sustainable, scalable, and replicable model for scholarly publishing that serves the needs of all stakeholders in a shared effort. We look forward to furthering our common goal over the next two years to further refine the business model and market this special collaboration more effectively to achieve even greater participation among eligible institutions.
For more information on Knowledge Exchange, visit: www.knowledge-exchange.info/