Biology Image Library - scientific stock photography?
22 10 2007(via The Biotech Weblog) BioMed Central has launched the Biology Image Library - online collection of scientifically interesting and meaningful images across biology and biomedicine.
Most of the images at BIL are available free of charge for non-commercial purposes (like teaching), but buying commercial-use rights is also possible. I don’t really agree that the library is aimed at students (teachers, lecturers - maybe), since personal subscriptions are $293 per annum and I could imagine that institute subscriptions are not cheaper. UPDATE: See comments below. To me a corporate client is a main target of this initiative, but I may agree that relatively high subscription rates may be dictated by the nature of the images - most of them come from experiments (almost no computer generated illustrations).
Microstock photography sites hold quite a lot of science-related images, however their scientific value is very often zero (as an example, search for DNA). It is overall nice idea to have a scientific equivalent of a microstock, but I would rather leave the subscriptions out and release low quality (for web/computer screen use) material under non-commercial Creative Commons license.
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Re: the comment: “I don’t really agree that the library is aimed at students (teachers, lecturers - maybe), since personal subscriptions are $293 per annum”
As with most online journal and databases, the primary model for student access is insitutional subscription. For a few thousand dollars an institution can provide access to Biology Image Library for all of its faculty and many thousands of students.
See http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/libraries/pricing?product=bil for institutional pricing information.
I couldn’t find institutional pricing previously - it looks fair enough, although still I would love to see it freely available
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I admit I didn’t think about, let’s say, university providing access to BIL for all its faculty and students.