1. Witness Statement – TAIR
Eva Huala
Phoenix Bioinformatics

2. What is TAIR?
Genome database for the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, established in 1999
Focus on manual curation of gene function (~33,000 genes)
Was NSF-funded
(1.1M/yr direct costs)
International usage (~60K unique visitors/month
March 14, 2015

3. 2014
2015
2016
Annual Revenue:
$627,000
$919,000
$1,016,000

4. 1) What is the main sources of income (who pays and how), and how are these presented as a business model?
Who pays for TAIR?
University libraries and consortia (55%)
Countries (China, Switzerland) (27%)
Companies (16%)
Individual researchers (2%)
How do they pay?
Annual subscription
Business model:
Collect experimental data from the research literature
Integrate it into a comprehensive gold standard dataset
Metered access, 75 free page views/month, casual users don’t need to pay
All data freely released after 1 year to fosterlarge scale reuse

5. 2) What are the pros and cons of that business model?
Stable revenue
Those that value the resource also support it (international support!)
Incentives for maintaining the repository are welll aligned with what the user community wants
Access remains broad
Cons
May not be suitable for repositories with small user base
Library budgets are limited, the model may not scale to large numbers of repositories.

6. 3) Why is this appropriate to the repository’s mission and the services offered?
Stable funding enhances mission fulfillment
Without a revenue stream the repository ceases to exist
Stable revenue enables long term planning and increased efficiency, lower costs, higher quality service
A pay for access model provides a business incentive to increase usage. Result: data curation, discovery and reuse are priorities, as they drive up revenue.
A pay to deposit model provides a business incentive to increase data deposition. Result: efficient and easy data deposition are the highest priority. Most suitable for repositories intended as data archives (e.g. reproducibility)

7. Inherent incentives vary by funding model
Pay to submit (open access model)
Pay to use (subscription model)
Business Incentives:
The more data submitted the more revenue
To increase submission numbers, make the submission process easy
Data reuse not directly relevant to database success
Business Incentives:
The more usage, the more revenue
To increase users, make data easy to find and use
Data reuse is directly relevant to database success
Most suited for:
Data integration, discovery and reuse
Most suited for:
Preservation of original dataset, reproducibility

8. 4) How do you rate the level of acceptance from the ‘designated community’ / stakeholders?
TAIR Users: Acceptance is high, based on coversations with researchers at conferences
University Librarians: Most accept this as a necessity to support a valuable resource, a few do not. There is concern about how many additional repositories will take this approach

9. 5) What options, if any, are being considered for additional income streams, costs limitation?
Partnerships with other repositories to develop a shared business infrastructure capable of providing a range of user-based support models:
Free to submit, pay to access (subscriptions)
Pay to submit, free to access (open access model)
Voluntary contribution model
Grant funding as ‘venture capital’ to build new research infrastructure (repositories, online analysis tools)