Bioline publications: how its evolution has mirrored the growth of the internet

Bioline was set up in 1993 as a result of an increasingly loud rumble of dissatisfaction among scientists about the way research information was (or was not) distributed. The rumble reached a crescendo at a biotechnology/ bioinformatics conference in Trieste, Italy at which Professor Joshua Lederberg (winner of the 1958 Noble Prize in Medicine) deplored the growing gap between the cost of learned journals and the budgets of libraries to purchase them (Branin and Case, 1998). This problem was recognised as being particularly pronounced for research institutions in developing countries (Ginsparg, 1996). At the same time, the appearance of a possible means of using information technology and communications (ICT) set the research community thinking that there may, just possibly, be a low cost solution in sight. Some of us had been collaborating as working scientists on online databases and had some experience in the use of electronic communication. We had skills in database development, in software development and in serving on editorial boards of various biological journals during the normal course of our academic careers. We had contacts in the international scientific community and in the publishing world. As scientists, we also knew what scientists wanted. Perhaps we had enough collective knowledge to do something constructive to test the electronic publishing water. On the negative side, we had little experience of the likely impact of the new technologies on the distribution of scientific research; we knew little about the likely response from the scientific community to a novel method of accessing research information. We also had no idea of the consequences of e-publishing on the economics of journal publishing. Would we become millionaires or debtors? We decided to test the water. This article describes the progress of Bioline Publications from birth to the present time and draws some conclusions from our experience