Bioline International Spreads It's Wings
From OpenAccess
This is a preprint that will appear in the January issue of Information Today.
Bioline International spreads its wings
OA Success Changes Business Plan
By Robin Peek
Bioline International (Bioline) is one of the Open Access (OA) success stories. The main goal of the project is the “global exchange of essential research information published in developing countries,” research that its founders argue is little known and under-used. Specifically, the goal has been to improve the “South to North and South to South flow of information.” Bioline has long been considered one of the OA pioneers and a model of how scholarly publishing could be changed. Thus it came as a surprise when the University of Toronto (U of T) announced that it was going to cut its funding for Bioline, given that the need for it services was growing. More significantly, the money that was pledged until 2011 was meant to allow Bioline time to develop a new business plan that would allow it to expand its coverage.
Bioline has provided a service for raising the visibility of peer viewed, bioscience journals published in developing countries. Bioline is not a publisher, but an aggregator that offers a free platform for 70 journals from 16 countries (including Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, Ghana, India, Iran, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda, Venezuela ), allowing them to post their content on the Bioline website. Last year, an additional 70 new journals applied to join Bioline. In 2007, the system recorded 3.5 million full text downloads. While the usage statistics show that research universities in the North are some of the most frequent users of Bioline, researchers from the developing world are also strong users, showing the value of the unique content. Launched in 1993 by United Kingdom microbiologists Barbara and Brian Kirsop, Bioline was an experimental service created to distribute scientific papers online, and was run as a partnership between Brazil's Tropical Database (now the Reference Center on Environmental Information, or CRIA) and Bioline Publications in the UK. CRIA provided the technology infrastructure and document management was handled in the UK. The open source database is running SQL and CRIA uses XML to deliver the content.
In early 2000, the U of T Libraries assumed the role previously performed in the UK. Since 2000, Leslie Chan, Program Supervisor for the Joint Program in New Media Studies and the International Studies program at the U of T at Scarborough, has served as the Associate Director of Bioline. Coming from China, Chan is particularly concerned for the developing world. "People forget that China is still a developing country," he explains.
Long Term Plan
To make possible the incorporation of other journals waiting to become part of the system, Bioline is implementing a new business plan that will use a Membership and Sponsorship drive as its backbone. According to Chan, from 2002-06, 80% of the budget came from U of T. “As of next fiscal year, the Dean has promised only $10K out of the $100K we budgeted, so we have to raise the 90K externally. We are about half way there already, so the membership drive is crucial.”
As no charges are made to publishers using Bioline, all fees and donations are used directly to support the website and document enhancement costs. Institutional membership fees are set at $500/year to enable widespread support. The funding support will currently maintain the existing Bioline infrastructure and incorporate other peer reviewed journals waiting to take part in this global initiative. Like other open access initiatives, Bioline faces the challenge of overcoming the common misunderstanding that open access means “cost free.” An analogy that is frequently used in OA circles is the comparison between free beer versus the free puppy/kitten (depending upon your pet of choice). What good folks seem to forget, time and time again, is that the emphasis is on free access. "The frustration is that librarians will often say that they support open access, forgetting that to produce the content and continue the service someone has to pay," Chan notes. “The librarians that ’get it’ are still in the minority. A lot of librarians say that they support OA in principle, but then don't want to support it financially. In fact it only costs a small amount of money for alternative publishing initiatives. If every institution chips in a little bit, the more unique and valuable content we can provide.”
Another issue is the focus, or even preoccupation, with high impact factor metrics, that not only drive library spending, but at the same time reduce the diversity of knowledge dissemination. What has already happened in the humanities is now becoming part of mainstream science. The reduction in the number of monographs that libraries have been able to purchase has long been a problem for scholarship in a field such as art history.
“Extremely expensive 'library or personal' subscription systems of traditional/mainstream journals, despite the best efforts of our libraries to keep current, have inadvertently contributed to the 'supremacy' of the traditional basis of knowledge and methods of knowledge generation”, says Aysan Sev'er, Professor of Sociology, U of T. “In my judgment, efforts like Bioline, for the first time in the history of journal publishing, and thanks also to information technologies to some degree, have leveled the playing field for 'other' voices that we do not generally hear”.
Although we have seen this trend in the sciences happening over time, particularly in the era of the “big deals”, a researcher whose work may not be “mainstream” because he or she studies, say, tropical soil conditions, may not only have a more difficult time finding an outlet to publish their research, but additionally simply accessing the research upon which they build their own work. Sadly, part of this is arrogance, stemming from the misguided belief that the solutions to global problems can be found only in a few places around the world, such as Palo Alto, CA; New Haven, CT; Oxford, UK; or Cambridge, MA (in the spirit of full disclosure, I have lived here for sixteen years in the heart of Harvard/MIT country)
Further information on Bioline services and the membership drive can be obtained from http://www.bioline.org.br.
