Transitioning BioCyc to a Subscription Model

BioCyc.org is an extensive web portal for microbial genomics and
metabolic pathways. BioCyc contains 7,600 microbial genomes including
929 organisms from the Human Microbiome Project. Two BioCyc databases
are noteworthy as bacterial references: the EcoCyc database for
Escherichia coli has been curated from 30,000 publications, and the
BsubCyc database for Bacillus subtilis has been curated from 4,000
publications. In addition, the MetaCyc database is a multi-organism
metabolic pathway database describing 2,400 experimentally elucidated
pathways. BioCyc contains an extensive set of bioinformatics tools.
Genome-related tools include a genome browser, sequence searching and
alignment, and extraction of sequence regions. Pathway-related tools
include a tool for navigating zoomable organism-specific metabolic map
diagrams that can be painted with metabolomics and gene-expression
data.

In 2016 we transitioned BioCyc to a subscription model, in partnership
with Phoenix Bioinformatics. Subscription revenues are invested into
database curation, website operations, sales, and marketing. We will
describe the new BioCyc subscription model and its success level to date.