By Steven Scarpa
This year’s issues of the Yale Peabody Museum’s seminal scientific journal “The Bulletin of the Peabody Museum of Natural History” are now available for free to the public thanks to a new partnership.
The museum participated in publisher BioOne’s “Subscribe to Open” campaign. The model uses existing subscription funds and workflows to enable greater access to scholarly content. BioOne offers free access to 71 titles from 54 members of its publishing community, representing societies, museums, research organizations, and independent presses.
The Bulletin can be found here. The Peabody’s open access issues will be published in April and October.
“This success demonstrates the power of community-supported publishing. We’re grateful to the libraries and institutions whose subscriptions made this possible, and to our authors and readers who continue to trust us with their research and their time,” BioOne said in a statement.
Susan Butts, the Peabody’s director of collections and research, sees this as an important opportunity to widen access to the Peabody’s offerings.
“The Peabody has long been a place that both generates and publishes new scientific ideas from a variety of disciplines. Our partnership with BioOne helps us reach a new audience hungry to learn more about the world and our place in it,” Butts said.
The Bulletin, like its Whitney Avenue home, got its start in 1925. It was published as a peer reviewed monograph until 2004. Beginning in 2006, the Bulletin converted to a journal format and continues to publish important research twice a year on the topics of evolution, phylogeny, taxonomy, systematics, biology, botany, zoology, invertebrate paleontology and paleoecology, paleobotany, and archaeology.
For example, in 2024 the Bulletin published a new work that revises the understanding of the branches of the Tree of Life for the enormously diverse living and fossil bony fishes, representing about half of Earth’s vertebrate species. Peabody curator Thomas Near was one of the authors of the project.
The April edition, the first released under the new open access model, features the description of a new moth species by Larry Gall, and the description of four new species of darters by Near, PhD candidate Julia Wood and other co-authors.
“This is great for scholarly research and for helping to fulfill important aspects of the Peabody’s educational mission,” said Sweeney, Executive Editor of the Bulletin and Senior Collections Manager in the Division of Botany.