BioOne is an online, full-text database of 167 peer-reviewed scientific journals and books in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences. Included publications are published by 126 scientific societies, museums, and independent presses. Nearly half of BioOne's corpus of titles are published online exclusively by BioOne and 70% are ranked by the Institute for Scientific Information.
BioOne was established in 2000 in Washington, DC, as a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization by five scholarly collaborators: the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)[1], The University of Kansas, Greater Western Library Alliance, and Allen Press. The main impetus for BioOne's creation was the common desire amongst key scholarly stakeholders for an alternative to commercial scientific, technical, and medical (STM) publishing.[2] Half of the subscription fee revenue is divided between the participating publications.[1]
In 2008 BioOne provided over 1,200 global subscribing institutions with access to over 500,000 pages of content, receiving 40.7 million user hits. Through participation in philanthropic programs HINARI, OARE, AGORA, and eIFL, BioOne is also made available at no cost to over 2,500 institutions in the developing world.