RIP: BioMedNet, 1995–2004

If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of regular BioMedNet users, you’ll know that the Web site went dark on June 30, after nine years of creating a large and vibrant community of life scientists, based on content such as a bookstore, mouse knockout database, PubMed, and a biomedical database. (If you’re a regular reader of The Scientist Daily News online, you’ll know that we reported the coming demise in December.) The abridged story of the once wildly successful site is worth repeating at a time when publishers are still grappling with what works and what doesn’t on the Web, and because so many scientists and others felt so warmly about BioMedNet’s offerings.

Vitek Tracz dreamt up what would eventually become BioMedNet in the early 1990s, before the Internet had really taken off. On a US trip in the very early days of the Web, Tracz decided to move BioMedNet to the Internet. Sometime after BioMedNet was born, Tracz – now CEO of BioMedCentral and The Scientist – tapped Sarah Greene, who had created inter activity at Current Protocols, an updateable, loose-leaf series of methods volumes, to work on the site.

Speaking of Current Protocols "We had little pink reader-response postcards – yes, cards that you actually post by mail! providing corrections or suggestions for tweaking the protocols that one could only know from slaving away in the lab," recalls Greene, former CEO of BioMedNet and Praxis Press and now director of publishing and new media at the New York Academy of Sciences. "We had t-shirts as rewards, with the slogan ‘Never Clone Alone’ that biologists really loved, but the only way to get one was to submit a postcard that helped the book get better."

It was a simple idea, but Current Protocols "exemplified how a community of like-minded persons could use their common experience to create a whole that is bigger than its parts," says Greene. "You can see how the Internet, which provided a powerful combination of immediacy and searching/filtering vast amounts of data, would prove to take this idea of community publishing or ultimate interactivity to new and undreamt of levels."

"Although the word community is bandied about, one shouldn’t forget that it’s really the focus on the individual, the representative unit of the community, that made BioMedNet stand apart from other Web sites," notes Greene. "The idea of the individual scientist purchasing a single article was revolutionary in those days and still might seem so today, given the ultimate demise of that publishing model." The central idea was to create a community site, with registration, for the biomedical research community, so that scientists could find and communicate with one another easily. The site would then become a platform for publishing that would address individual scientists, rather than libraries or institutions having the purchasing power.

Tremendous risks were involved in creating this new business model, including convincing publishers to join in. "To invest up to [€20 million] in a project without being able to see a way of making money out of it, one must either be mad or a genius," wrote The Bookseller when Tracz invested in Electronic Press, one of the companies that was developing BioMedNet. "Vitek Tracz, chairman of the Current Science group, who has done just that, would appear to be a bit of both."

At the time, Tracz called the model "the most efficient system for buying or selling information, but because there are no existing models, we do not yet know how to make money from it. But money will be made; we will find a way. But to start with we will have to let things go cheap or free." He reminded the magazine of an old Polish saying: If you’re going to fall off a horse, make it a big one.

BioMedNet certainly became a big horse, even if it was Elsevier, who bought the site in 1998, and not Tracz, who eventually fell off. Membership of the site grew from 50,000 in 1997, to more than 500,000 by 2000, and eventually to over 1 million. Much of that success was due to the fun side of BioMedNet, the award-winning webzine HMS Beagle. "By generating a news service and also bringing in general-interest debates, reviews, profiles, and career advice, and by relating biology back to the bigger worlds of culture and policy, we were able to provide a unique ‘lounge’ or common ground for the special-interest groups that comprised [BioMedNet's] primary constituency," says Greene.

In the end, it was business that sealed the fate of the site. There’s good reason to think that BioMedNet’s focus was too different from Elsevier’s thrust on library sales. "BioMedNet’s main role has been as a tool to market our life science products," Elsevier writes in a message on the site. "After careful reviews of the costs and benefits involved, we have decided to concentrate marketing resources into what we believe to be more efficient methods. We also believe that the investment saved can be channeled into the continued development of existing platforms such as ScienceDirect."

We’ll see. The ideas behind BioMedNet and the HMS Beagle have given rise to a host of admiring imitators. In that sense, BioMedNet will live on.