The Foundation for Science and Technologydeveloped through FCCN - which guarantees permanent and unlimited access to scientific articles and publications from some of the most important content providers - is to be congratulated.
Learn about its history and evolution over the last two decades here.
The foundation
The online knowledge library - b-on - began operating in March 2004 and since then has allowed open access to thousands of scientific publications by research and higher education institutions.
This access to the full texts of thousands of scientific journals and e-books online has been achieved through nationally negotiated subscriptions, the first negotiations having taken place in 2001.
Growth and expansion
The evolution of b-on has been even more visible since 2007. Until this year, the service's licensing model was, in principle, All for All , which meant that all members had access to the same set of contents.
That year, in order to increase its reach, the online library signed Some for Some agreements with five additional publishers .
In 2009, it also began subscribing to e-booksbroadening the range of resources available to the national research and higher education community.
During the first few years of activity, the number of downloads also grew, from around 2 million in the first year to over 6 million in 2010. The number of institutions joining the initiative also grew during this period, from 48 to 70.
To corroborate this evolution, in 2014 I carried out a service satisfaction survey of more than 500 researchers. Only 5% said they didn't use b-on, and the main added value of the library pointed out by the 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 defining the advantages offered to various audiences, such as Students, Teachers/Researchers, Librarians and Publishers .
And it was also at this time that the motto "Together we share knowledge" was born, which to this day is the main feature and message of the b-on homepage .
More Open Science
With a view to the wider implementation of open access principles and best practices, 13 of the contracts negotiated by b-on for the three-year period 2022-2024 now offer the possibility for authors from member institutions to publish their articles in open access with these publishers, under what are known as transformative agreements . In 2022, 2120 articles were published in open access under these agreements.
To find out more about the history of this service, Arquivo.pt has traveled back in time with b-on, highlighting some of its main milestones on a single page. Find out more about the evolution of the b-on website over the years at https://arquivo.pt/wayback/20150423051135/http://www.b-on.pt/.
