The Arabidopsis Information Resource

TAIR is a database of plant genetic and genomic information focused on the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. TAIR was launched in 1999 and was supported by three successive rounds of National Science Foundation funding up to 2013. Following the loss of NSF funding, TAIR transitioned to subscription funding in 2014 under the umbrella of Phoenix Bioinformatics, a new nonprofit founded by TAIR staff. TAIR funding relies mainly on subscriptions from university libraries and library consortia, companies and individual researchers, with additional income from subscriptions at the whole country level. This business model makes use of the existing infrastructure at libraries for managing traditional print and digital academic journal subscriptions and library staff with extensive experience in evaluating the value of academic resources to their researchers and handling the legal and financial aspects of licensing, invoicing and payment. Many of TAIR’s academic library subscriptions have terms of three to five years, providing a stable source of revenue for the future. Acceptance of TAIR’s subscription model has been high overall. Researchers appreciate our nonprofit mission-driven organizational structure and understand that if TAIR had not made the transition to subscriptions our curation activities would have ceased, and researchers would no longer have access to curated and integrated data from the research literature. Our outlook for the future includes continued reliance on subscription funding for operations and development of new features or tools funded by a mixture of government grants, private foundations, and subscription funds.