A Survey of Business Trends at BioOne Publishing Partners and Its Implications for BioOne

This paper describes a survey of BioOne participating publishers that was conducted during the fall of 2003. In that survey, BioOne collected data from 18 not-for-profit publishers on circulation levels, scholarly output in terms of pages and articles produced, revenues, and expenditures. From eight of the publishers, complete profit, loss, and circulation information was gathered, while the remaining 10 publishers only provided circulation data and answered general operations questions. This information was then compiled to compare the business operations of these publishers against industry-standard benchmarks to assess their business practices and to examine the effect of recent trends on publishers’ revenue streams and costs. The paper also explores these data in relation to shifting to a publishing model based not on print but electronic subscriptions.