The service of Foundation for Science and Technology, developed through the FCCN – which guarantees permanent and unlimited access to scientific articles and publications from some of the most important content providers – is to be congratulated.
Discover its history and evolution over these two decades here.
The foundation
The online knowledge library – b-on – started operating in March 2004, since then, allowing open access to thousands of scientific publications by research and higher education institutions.
This access to full texts of thousands of scientific journals and online e-books was achieved through signatures negotiated at a national level, with the first negotiations taking place in 2001.
Growth and expansion
The evolution of b-on was even more visible from 2007 onwards. Until this year, the service's licensing model was, in principle, All for All, i.e, Everything for Everyone, which meant that all members accessed the same set of content.
That year, in order to increase its scope, the online library has signed agreements under a Some for Some with five additional publishers.
In 2009, it also began to subscribe e-books, expanding the typology of resources made available to the national research and higher education community.
During the first years of activity, the number of downloads also grew, rising from around 2 million in the first year to more than 6 million in 2010. The number of institutions that joined the initiative also grew during this period, from 48 to 70.
To corroborate this trend, in 2014 I conducted a service satisfaction survey of over 500 researchers. Only 5% responded that they did not use b-on, and the main advantages of the library, as highlighted by respondents, were: support to carry out research (83.5%), to increase scientific production (77.2%) and to publish in higher quality journals (63.5%).
Innovation
In 2015, the new b-on website was launched, dividing the information shared into four main categories: Content, Services, User Support and News. The new page also included a section that defined the benefits offered to various audiences, such as Students, Teachers/Researchers, Librarians and Publishers.
And it was also at this moment that the motto “Together we share knowledge” was born, which is, to this day, the great highlight and message of homepage from b-on.
More Open Science
With a view to the wider implementation of open access principles and good practices, 13 of the contracts negotiated by b-on for the 2022-2024 triennium now offer the possibility for authors from participating institutions to publish their articles in open access with these publishers, under what are called transformative agreements. In 2022, 2120 open access articles were published under these agreements.
To learn more about the history of this service, Arquivo.pt traveled through time with b-on, highlighting in a single page some of its main milestones. Learn even more about the evolution of the b-on page over the years in https://arquivo.pt/wayback/20150423051135/http://www.b-on.pt/
