● Introduction

UniBio Press is an incorporated nonprofit organization established by a number of Japanese biological societies with the support of SPARC Japan, a project of the National Institute of Informatics (NII). The only entity of its kind in Japan, it is an e-journal package which provides the journals of its member societies to overseas libraries as part of the BioOne2 collection1 and to Japanese libraries as “UniBio Press.” It began in 2004 with three members, the Japanese Society of Mammalian Ova Research, the Mammalogical Society of Japan, and the Zoological Society of Japan. They have since been joined by the Herpetological Society of Japan, the Ornithological Society of Japan, and the Palaeontological Society of Japan, bringing the total to six.

In this article, I would like to look back over these seven years at UniBio Press and to give a better idea of our activities, briefly outline the history and present situation of BioOne, with which we work in close partnership. BioOne is an overseas platform that UniBio uses to release journals, but because it is in a different position from commercial publishers and have a different policy from them as well, we have access to information on the overseas situation of the journals participating in our UniBio Press. Thus, I will also report on the reception of our member journals overseas. As of May 1, 2011, the member societies of UniBio Press, their journal titles and websites were as follows:

Herpetological Society of Japan: Current Herpetology, http://zoo.zool.kyoto-u.ac.jp/herp/index.html

Mammalogical Society of Japan: Mammal Study, http://www.mammalogy.jp/english/index_e.html

Japanese Society of Mammalian Ova Research: Journal of Mammalian Ova Research, http://jsmor.kenkyuukai.jp/about/

Palaeontological Society of Japan: Paleontological Research, http://www.palaeo-soc-japan.jp/E_index.html

Ornithological Society of Japan: Ornithological Science, http://wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp/osj/english/home_e.html

Zoological Society of Japan: Zoological Science, http://www.zoology.or.jp/

● About BioOne

Figure 1: Statistics presented by BioOne COO Susan Skomal

BioOne is a not-for-profit corporation founded in 1999, and jointly funded, by a partnership of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), the University of Kansas, the Greater Western Library Alliance (formerly Big 12 Plus Libraries Consortium), and Allen Press, Inc. Thus, it was created when a meta-organization of scientific societies, the US headquarters of SPARC, a university, a library consortium, and a publisher looked together at the future of scholarly communication and aimed to create a new model for bioscience research journals. BioOne marks its tenth anniversary this year, having been in operation since 2001. The four not-for-profit founding organizations are still represented on the Board of Directors, while Allen Press has a representative on the Advisory Council, which also comprises members of the scientific and library communities.2 Figure 1 consists of statistics presented by BioOne’s COO Susan Skomal at the 2011 BioOne Publishers and Partners Meeting in Washington, DC, on April 22, 2011.

BioOne has a unique business model. It retains 50 percent of subscription receipts to cover costs and distributes the remaining 50 percent to the participating society and institutional publishers according to a formula based on their journals’ number of pages and hits received. The societies’ subscription receipts thus clearly and precisely reflect their performance within BioOne, and they are never in any doubt as to how the sum was decided. Also, as BioOne reports annual statistics such as the subscription growth rate, the publishers can closely track increases in their returns.

Among its expenses, BioOne absorbs the costs of the unified XML format as well as platform service fees. It does not publish its raw logs or details of its pricing to consortia around the world.

Worldwide sales increased by 15.4% over 2009, from $4,360,603 to $5,029,809 in total net sales. In 2010 BioOne1 was subscribed to by 1,399 institutions and organizations worldwide, an increase of 10.9% over 2009. BioOne2 [which includes UniBio] … reached 714 global subscribers.… Notably, these gains for BioOne’s participating publishers were achieved without an annual price increase….
The BioOne website drew 24,972,873 total hits in 2010…. Of this total, 10,384,724 hits came from researcher accesses to abstracts and full-text articles…. It is important to note that these “royalty-eligible” hits declined 10% from 2009, due to the impact of COUNTER’s Release 3, which refined the methodology for counting full-text hits.

● Japanese Library Subscriptions to UniBio Press

In 2004, UniBio Press was the first Japanese scientific organization to negotiate site licensing for its electronic journals with the Japan Association of National University Libraries (JANUL).4 Figure 2 shows the changes in UniBio’s vendors, and, where I am aware of them, mergers and acquisitions among commercial publishers. This table gives some idea of how hard it has been for UniBio to market its e-journals, together with the background to these difficult conditions, i.e., the constantly changing environment of scholarly communication. From 2007 to 2010, BioOne provided separate subscriptions to the UniBio Press package, via the BioOne platform, to university libraries in Japan only. This year, we have resumed selling subscriptions to our six journals to Japanese libraries under the name “UniBio Press” while also participating in BioOne2. For this year only, we are using NII’s WEKO5 platform; starting in 2012, the contents will be available on PierOnline,6 a service of Sunmedia Co., Ltd.

With the exception of Zoological Science, UniBio Press’s journals are small in scale, but they are published by the societies that bring together Japan’s leading ornithologists, paleontologists, herpetologists, and mammalogists. Like other academic associations, these societies meet an essential need not only in Japan but also overseas.

Figure 2: Changes in the platforms and vendors of the UniBio Press package

*1 Cambridge Information Group; *2 Cambridge Scientific Abstracts; *3 BioMed Central; *4 Publishers Communication Group

● Overseas Library Subscriptions to BioOne2

Compared to its predecessor, BioOne1, BioOne2 brings in smaller returns (annual subscriptions) and has fewer library subscribers. As a new package, its subscription receipts showed 35 percent growth in 2010, but the outlook for 2011 and beyond is uncertain. In Figure 3, I have tabulated information provided to the societies in BioOne Publisher Report, showing which organizations access their journals most frequently. (I have omitted the access figures.)

/Zoological Science		/Current Herpetology		/Ornithological Science
2009 Rank Institution/Consortium Country 1 COPPUL Canada 2 NorthEast Research Libraries US 3 Greater Western Library Alliance US 4 SOLINET US 5 CAPES Brazil 6 University of Tokyo Japan 7 Hokkaido University Japan 8 Ontario Council of Universities Libraries Canada 9 Knowledge Exchange-Germany Germany 10 Kyoto University Japan		2009 Rank Institution/Consortium Country 1 CAPES Brazil 2 Knowledge Exchange -Germany Germany 3 Kyoto University Japan 4 Greater Western Library Alliance US 5 Nylink US 6 Unicersidade de Sao Paulo Brazil 7 Fedlink US 8 Unicersidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul Brazil 9 NorthEast Research Libraries US 10 Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Germany		2009 Rank Institution/Consortium Country 1 Greater Western Library Alliance US 2 COPPUL Canada 3 SOLINET US 4 NorthEast Research Libraries US 5 Nylink US 6 CAPES Brazil 7 Fedlink US 8 Knowledge Exchange-Germany Germany 9 RIKEN Japan 10 Ontario Council of University Lib. Canada
2010 Rank Institution/Consortium Country 1 UniBio Japan 2 Knowledge Exchange Europe 3 Greater Western Library Alliance US 4 NorthEast Research Libraries US 5 COPPUL Canada 6 LYRASIS US 7 Hokkaido University Japan 8 Society Memebr Access Japan 9 University of Tokyo Japan 10 SOLINET US		2010 Rank Institution/Consortium Country 1 UniBio Japan 2 Knowledge Exchange Europe 3 Aarhus University Denmark 4 Greater Western Library Alliance US 5 Kyoto University Japan 6 HINARI, AGORA, and OARE Multi 7 Copenhagen University Denmark 8 NorthEast Research Libraries US 9 Federal Library &Information Center US 10 California Digital Library US		2010 Rank Institution/Consortium Country 1 HINARI, AGORA, and OARE Multi 2 Knowledge Exchange Europe 3 UniBio Japan 4 Greater Western Library Alliance US 5 NorthEast Research Libraries US 6 COPPUL Canada 7 Fedlink US 8 LYRASIS US 9 CAUL Australia 10 SOLINET US

/Paleontological Research		Journal of Mammalian Ova Research		/Mammal Study
2009 Rank Institution/Consortium Country 1 Universidad de Buenos Aires Argentina 2 Greater Western Library Alliance US 3 University of Tokyo Japan 4 NorthEast Research Libraries US 5 COPPUL Canada 6 CAPES Brazil 7 Knowledge Exchange-Netherland Netherland 8 Knowledge Exchange-Germany Germany 9 Knowledge Exchange-UK UK 10 Kyoto University Japan		2009 Rank Institution/Consortium Country 1 Tokyo University of Agriculture Japan 2 SOLINET US 3 University of Tokyo Jaoan 4 Chinese Academy of Sciences China 5 RIKEN Japan 6 Tohoku University Japan 7 Rakuno Gakuen University Library Japan 8 NorthEast Research Libraries Japan 9 Knowledge Exchange-Germany Germany 10 Nylink US		2009 Rank Institution/Consortium Country 1 HINARI, AGORA,and OARE Multi 2 Hokkaido University Japan 3 Kyoto University Japan 4 COPPUL Canada 5 Fedlink US 6 Forestry and Fisheries Research Council US 7 University of Tokyo Japan 8 Greater Western Library Alliance US 9 Nylink US 10 Knowledge Exchange-Germany Germany
2010 Rank Institution/Consortium Country 1 Knowledge Exchange Europe 2 UniBio Japan 3 Greater Western Library Alliance US 4 Society Member Access Japan 5 NorthEast Research Libraries US 6 COPPUL Canada 7 LYRASIS US 8 University of Tokyo Japan 9 CAPES Brazil 10 Universidad de Buenos Aires Argentina		2010 Rank Institution/Consortium Country 1 UniBio Japan 2 University of Tokyo Japan 3 Knowledge Exchange Europe 4 Tokyo University of Agriculture Japan 5 RIKEN Japan 6 Kyoto University Japan 7 Osaka University Japan 8 Veritas University Nigeria 9 eIFL Multi 10 Shinshu University Japan *Osaka and Shinshu University libraries are UniBio subscribers. It is unclear how they have been divided.		2010 Rank Institution/Consortium Country 1 UniBio Japan 2 Knowledge Exchange Europe 3 Society Member Access Japan 4 Iwate University Japan 5 Hokkaido Universuty Japan 6 Universitaet Bonn Germany 7 ULB Bonn Germany 8 *See below. Germany 9 Greater Western Library Alliance US 10 HINARI, AGORA,and OARE Multi *Bibliothek des Zoologischen Forschungsmuseum Alexander Koenig

Figure 3: Organizations that access UniBio Press journals

● The UniBio Press Business Model

Figure 4: Summarizes the 2010 accounts of UniBio Press.

Figure 4 summarizes the 2010 accounts of UniBio Press. In practical terms, UniBio had central and practical mission to return e-journal subscription receipts to the member societies fairly and to the maximum possible extent. This means, of course, that its goals also include raising the journals’ status and increasing their name recognition by achieving the above primary mission. In this connection, three member journals that did not have Impact Factors (IFs) when they joined UniBio have since been listed on the Web of Science: Paleontological Research (Palaeontological Society of Japan) in 2009, and Mammal Study (Mammalogical Society of Japan) and Ornithological Science (Ornithological Society of Japan) in 2010.

However, UniBio’s work does require funds. Last year, UniBio Press returned the amounts shown in BioOne Publisher Report to the society publishers without deducting any costs, because we wanted the figures to be self-evident. We pay our labor costs and other operating expenses (office rent, auditors, and so on) out of our domestic sales and what BioOne calls “Surplus Share payments,” which may or may not occur in a given year. It has been suggested at Board meetings that UniBio Press should retain more of the BioOne subscription receipts and spend more on staffing, but as director I believe our top priority should be to increase the subscription payments to our member societies. The impact of the ongoing appreciation of the yen on our bookkeeping should also be noted. In April 2011, the amount returned by BioOne was $62,947. This met the target, set when UniBio and BioOne began their partnership in 2007, to be reached by 2010 when the initial 3-year agreement ended. On a yen basis, however, we lost nearly 2.4 million yen in real terms, a major blow for UniBio.

● Japanese Biology Journals

I am sometimes asked why UniBio Press has only six member societies, and I think I have a duty to answer that question here based on our seven years of experience so far. The issues involved range from the difficulty of getting researchers to understand our work to major problems presently facing all biological societies. Biology is a highly subdivided field and the associations are not large, especially in Japan. Thus, as publishers, they tend to think it best for their journal’s sake to have a commercial publisher handle advertising and sales, and one certainly cannot fault that view. Also, the journal rankings headed by Nature and Science are firm, and in recent years new venues have emerged for biologists to publish articles, such as BMC7 and PLoS8 ; these are based on the Open Access (OA) model, and they include journals with high IFs. Furthermore, biology is seeing a constant stream—a veritable explosion—of research results. Taking all these factors together, I sense that the societies have grown used to having the path to publication made smooth by a commercial publisher, and that they want to publish with an outlet every researcher has heard of, rather than, say, a nonprofit like UniBio or BioOne that is committed both to supporting society publishing and to helping the financially hard-pressed libraries.

A couple of experiences, in particular, have fostered that impression. In one case, two societies that were with a commercial publisher approached us wanting to make a comparison before renewing their contracts, and we presented a rather low quote which was nonetheless complete even including the administrative costs for manuscript review, yet in the end they decided to stay where they were. I don’t know whether the publisher underbid for next term’s contract or not, but aside from that, the societies explained that it was important to give researchers the sense of security that comes from having the journal hosted on a commercial publisher’s site. In the second case, two societies that had not yet placed publishing contracts compared UniBio and commercial publishers before taking any steps, and one then opted for a commercial house. I heard that this was the strong preference of younger researchers, and that many expressed the desire to raise the status and recognition of their journal in this way. The other society has continued to self-publish through OA, which had seemed to be one of their priorities. I should add that all four journals are good publications with IFs, worthy of representing Japan.

Most researchers understand that electronic journal subscriptions are extremely expensive, and yet it cuts no ice with them, or their societies, that libraries cannot afford these costs and even worse, the costs are increasing every year, or that in order to read about results obtained with Japanese taxpayers’ money, more of that money has to be spent on foreign publishers’ subscription packages; they will still place their journals in commercial hands in order to continue publishing them or to raise their status. In Japan, as I noted in an earlier article,9 publishing in a high-IF journal earns many points toward securing research funds. I hear also that young researchers, in particular, place increased importance on IF these days, and this may lead to their firm trust in commercial publishers. One could call it “brand strength.” Although BioOne in my view has brand strength, it seems to be unfamiliar to many researchers, especially in Japan.

The last few years have been very difficult ones, not only for UniBio Press, but for the world of scholarly communication in general. One reason is the rapid shift to Open Access. OA is an important trend, and we have reached the point where scientific societies and commercial publishers can no longer reckon without it. But the corollary to OA is the need to make ends meet. I would like to think that we have seen the last of arguments that ignore this need and advocate OA on purely idealistic or emotional grounds, as a sort of knight in shining armor. In fact, the OA model is already spreading steadily, as the emergence of BMC and PLoS attests. They have dispelled the many initial criticisms and uncertainties, taken a risk, and secured their position. Today, it seems, many researchers want to publish their papers with BMC or PLoS even if it means paying around 250,000 yen in publication charges. The libraries’ strained budgets are not relevant in this scenario, because there are no soaring subscription fees. At the same time, however, there is no role as intermediary for the libraries.

● The Future of Scholarly Communication: Some Final Thoughts

Will journals continue to exist? Already, Elsevier has made a move toward the next stage, article-based publishing.10 Behind this course of action are technological advances that were once beyond our wildest imaginings. Journals used to have a prescribed format of volumes and issues; now, it seems, the day is coming when that format will break up or become meaningless. An individual article’s performance can be quantified in terms of hits or citations. The number of hits continues to be treated with caution, but the number of citations is an important criterion for evaluation. It is a more practical figure than the IF, which represents the performance of the entire journal. Moreover, articles are already uniquely identified by their digital object identifier (DOI). Thus, the environment is in place for evaluation on a paper-by-paper basis. As a society publisher, I naturally want to provide peer review as a form of quality assurance, but perhaps that will end up being open too, as in the trial conducted by Nature.11 Another major concern is how long libraries will be able to afford the Big Deal model.12 In addition, if a model is advanced in which readers pay only for the journals they need or for articles actually read, we may see clearly which journals are not chosen and read. Every society hopes its journal will be chosen, but it is researchers who will decide this on the basis of quality.

Ultimately, I expect, papers labeled with DOIs will exist individually in cyberspace or “in the cloud,” organized only by field. Access will be open, of course. Researchers will register their papers, and their fellow researchers will judge the quality and cite the good ones. They will receive an alert when a researcher whose work they are following publishes a paper. This is not a far-off prospect; it is largely feasible today. But it will take time before the world of scholarly communication, and researchers in particular, accept this as the normal procedure for “publishing” scientific information. Another important issue will be what becomes of quality assurance by peer review. In practice, for a society publisher like myself, it is very hard to know at this point in time, in 2011, what is the optimum and how we are going to publish journals until these things are achieved.

UniBio Press, as a biology journal publisher and a government-subsidized entity, continues to explore an approach that is entirely new to Japan. But, as I have often said to members of our participating societies over the last seven years, UniBio Press and BioOne do not claim to have found the one infallible approach. In a world of scientific information that is in constant flux, there is no one right method. Today, as leading journals vie for higher status in various ways, not only through quality, I think readers will agree that a society cannot expect to raise its journal’s status simply by putting electronic content on a website. The halcyon days of print publishing are over, and we must not approach e-journals with the same mindset. In this new era, together with maintaining quality or the right selection of articles, which is naturally important to a journal’s editors, it seems to me that the key issues are how to publish electronically, what kind of platform to use, and how the information made available in this way is then utilized. I look forward to discussing these questions further with our readers.

Notes and References