user22628: @Terdon made an interesting observation in the chat room recently:

The simple truth is that we've never been a site for biologists. Those
  of us who answer are usually biologists or in similar fields but in my
  experience, the vast majority of questions have always come from
  laymen.

This is supported by this figure, showing the relationship between rep and questions asked:

There was also a response from @James noting that graduate-level questions generally get fewer upvotes and less attention, although I acknowledge that's only anecdotal.
Recently, this proposal was closed due to an apparent substantial overlap with Biology.SE. When I asked the proposer about this, their reasoning appeared to be that questions on Biology.SE were mostly by laymen and they wanted to create a community for more 'hardcore' questions. Since the proposal was closed, the originator of this proposal has not become a contributor to Biology.SE and I'm not aware of any others from that potential community who joined, so the SE network lost a few dozen professional biologists.
I think both Biology.SE and the SE model in general are great. However, it seems that the fact that a high proportion of the community using Biology.SE consists of laymen could be discouraging professional biologists from joining. This does not affect the value of Biology.SE as a tool for public engagement but could limit its value as a tool for knowledge exchange.
Does anyone else think this might be the case, and if so have any thoughts about what, if anything, we need to do about it?
For example, one solution (although I don't really think it's a good one, it's just the first one I can think of) would be to set up a separate SE for biology professionals (ProfBio.SE?).
I have only arrived here recently, but it looks to me as though this has been a recurring issue: Shouldn't we be more tolerant with newcomers and non-biologists?, 
Should we encourange the relevant questions from non-professionals?

user10456: I would like to point out that the existing data, while interesting, requires a few more pieces of information before we can make any conclusions about it. 
Firstly, do we have any control graphs from other sites that are generally considered as "professional"? I gather that Math Overflow and Stack Overflow generally consist of professional programmers and mathematicians, so we should control for a known-professional site and a known-unprofessional site (Movies? SFF?) before we can make any conclusions. 
It could be the fact that the SE model simply attracts many low-rep users to the site, especially if the site caters to a subject taught in schools, and there doesn't appear to be any causal link between a high-rep user and a professional. 
Secondly, I feel that the graph has too low of a horizontal resolution. There are only a small handful of users with >10000 rep, myself excluded, and it would probably make more sense to plot the X axis as a semilogarithmic axis to show greater resolution. 
Finally, the mere observation (as others have pointed out) that there are many unprofessional "junk" questions doesn't turn the site into a site for amateurs. Any SE site for school subjects would naturally attract large numbers of lazy schoolchildren looking for others to do their homework, and (as FoldedChromatin has pointed out) this applies to students of programming too. We should, again, control for known-professional and known-amateur sites before we can make any conclusions. 

user25027: To add another quality: Very tricky scientific questions usually seem met by a very opinionated belief that something is not possible (without people providing support for that belief). 
Moreover I just looked at the chat and realized that some of the people with many points are using a very unprofessional language. 
Also I am a bit grumpy that people (including a moderator) mistook a question of mine, which is quite close to a field of mine, to reflect ignorance or lack of understanding.
As I conclude that this site is not for professional (non-methodological) biological questions, I will discontinue using biology exchange, and discontinue recommending it to peers. 

user22057: I agree that the number of very basic questions ( discourages professionals from joining. 
How did I get here? I am a professional and only landed here because I do IT work, noticed SE Biology while using StackOverflow (where I generally go for answers to questions) and had a little time to kill. I am certainly not here to ask questions, as I can generally find the answers myself and those I couldn’t I would go to specialized forums for. (The only question I asked was in an area I know nothing — entomology — about the moths that invaded the Euro 2016 Final. Voted down immediately, despite it turning out to be a question with a very interesting answer. Actually, just this minute, got its first upvote.) 
What did I think of the site when I arrived? Very poor overall — indeed awful compared with StackOverflow.
Why did I stay? Mainly because there were a few good question, and some other — even if naïve — that provoked me into thinking about some more basic aspects of areas I may have been involved in or taught. I also like to show people the wood when they are only looking at the trees.
But the key thing is that I am semi-retired, so I have the time. Given the general standard and the lack of practical utility I wouldn’t have spent time on this when I were still an active researcher. In my opinion, you will only get more professionals involved if standards are raised.
What to do about it? No really good suggestions. I do my bit both by voting to remove bad questions and by trying to help the posters find the answers themselves (and try to teach them how to write a proper title for a question) but some users of similar or higher reputation think I am too harsh/opinionated/arogant in this.

user15807: Let's be clear on this, Biology SE is (from the tour page):

Biology Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for biology researchers, academics, and students

Coming to your first question

I think both Biology.SE and the SE model in general are great However, it seems that the fact that a high proportion of the community using Biology.SE consists of laymen could be discouraging professional biologists from joining.
Does anyone else think this might be the case, and if so have any suggestions to help?

I would like to highlight the part about the presence of layman questions discouraging professional biologists from joining. First of all, I think it is safe to say that professional biologists are already very capable of unravelling any conceptual dilemmas they may have. Secondly, conceptual dilemmas they may have are not always directly related to biology per se, but to related fields, such as statistics (cross validated SE), bioinformatics (SO, SU). Indeed, someone mentioned in the linked proposal that ecology was one of the top tags in Biology. I think this has a very strong relation as to why ecology questions are not scavenged anywhere else.
After all, if I have a possibility of garnering more views from more people working in the same or related field, then why shouldn't I post these questions there. Example are the tags Phylogeny and blast on SO. Their existence on SO shows that questions which may be on Biology can get scavenged by some other site.
So I am of the view that "Professional" Biologists if they did join, would join for the fun of it (sating their curiosity) rather than asking questions whose answers they are quiet capable of figuring out for themselves. I visit the site for the same reason. I am not saying they will not ask questions, but them asking questions would not be the first reason for joining.
So no I do not think that the presence of layman questions dissuades experts from joining.

@James considers SO to be a successful SE example, and also states that Biology SE contains mostly garbage on the recents page. Because I visit the awk tag on SO, I would point you to the same. That page as well at any given time of day contains mostly garbage by an expert's standard.

For example, one solution (although I don't really think it's a good one, it's just the first one I can think of) would be to set up a separate SE for biology professionals (ProfBio.SE?).

As I stated above, I think most questions professionals may have about their own fields will be highly specific and specialised, but others which they may have will be commonplace in a different field. For example I work in Chromatin Architecture, a question I may have on ProfBio.SE regarding Immunology will be rudimentary to an immunologist. So then should we have separate sites for Immunologists and Chromatin Architecture? No, that hardly makes sense. They should all be on biology SE.
I think this same problem is very commonplace in the other scientific communities. So If you ask me, I think there should be a super-category for the Sciences, such as Science SE, where laymen can ask their questions alongside students and other questions which may be deemed as "stupid", while Biology SE is renamed to

Biology Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for researchers and professionals working in biology

Furthermore, I think using SO as a reference for biology is not correct. Because, I think being fluent in a programming language is much easier than building up pure academic knowledge and experience in an academic field.

user15695: Good question. It's always a good idea to now and then reflect on what our purpose and target audience is, as it often changes over time. Basically, I agree with the OP that biology SE is not really a site for professionals, at least not in the sense that professionals can come here and resolve actual research problems. But I'm not sure that will ever be feasible, and I don't think it means we need to change the site, because it does serve a function as it is.
I'm a cell biology / biochemistry professional and joined Biology SE a year ago. At the time I was curious if it might be a good network to shoot some out-of-the-box questions to other scientists, broaden my horizons a bit and discuss issues outside my own field of expertise. I have got some interesting feedback on my own broad-audience research questions, but mainly I have been engaged in answering more basic questions from students and the general public. And I think this is fine --- today I mainly view Biology SE as outreach activity, which I feel is a very important but often neglected task for academics.
I don't think we have critical mass as a forum for research-level questions from scientists, and I doubt we ever will achieve that. Biology is too large a research field, and fractioned into so many subfields, that asking a research-level question in any of them requires access to the handful of world experts that really knows what they're talking about. Most professionals ask those questions within their own network --- if I have a question on, say, mechanism of transcriptional regulation of the glutaminase enzyme by c-myc, I pick up the phone and call the local c-myc expert at the department next door. I don't expect to get an informed answer by shooting a question to a web forum or googling wikipedia. Most of the interesting answers (or rather advice and discussions) are not found in the published literature. A StackExchange site for the actual scientists might work for mathematics and computer science, but I think biology as an empirical discipline is quite different. (I think this is what Koustav Pal is saying as well in the other answer.)
This doesn't mean that Biology SE is not useful for scientists. While it is not a good channel for my own research questions, it is a good site for asking more general-purpose biology questions outside my own field, where I don't have expertise, out of pure curiosity. For example, I'm delighted to learn about weird species like the seemingly immortal hydras, or that some women have a fourth color receptor in their retina. On Biology SE I encounter biology facts and ideas I otherwise would not have come across, and I think that is important for professional biologists today, as the subfields become ever more specialized and people risk losing sight of the larger questions.
But again, mostly this site handles rather basic questions from students and the general public, setting facts straight and clearing up fundamental misconceptions. And I think that's a worthwhile activity, and we should continue doing it. I think the description from the tour page that Koustav Pal is quoting, that Biology SE is "for biology researchers, academics, and students", is not really accurate in describing who is asking the most questions (that would be students and laymen, as the graph in the question suggests). But it is probably fairly accurate if it describes who is giving the most answers. And perhaps that's more important to describe, as it signals to a new would-be member that this is a site where he/she can get some informed answers to his/her questions. And most of the time, they do get well informed answers --- better than they would find otherwise --- and for free. That's not a bad outcome.

22628: <p>@Terdon made an interesting observation in the chat room recently:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>The simple truth is that we've never been a site for biologists. Those
  of us who answer are usually biologists or in similar fields but in my
  experience, the vast majority of questions have always come from
  laymen.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>This is supported by this figure, showing the relationship between rep and questions asked:
<a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/5URst.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/5URst.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>

<p>There was also a <a href="http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/31679276#31679276">response from @James</a> noting that graduate-level questions generally get fewer upvotes and less attention, although I acknowledge that's only anecdotal.</p>

<p>Recently, <a href="http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/100847">this proposal</a> was closed due to an apparent substantial overlap with Biology.SE. When I asked the proposer about this, their <a href="https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/24034/wouldnt-this-proposal-mostly-overlap-with-biology-se">reasoning</a> appeared to be that questions on Biology.SE were mostly by laymen and they wanted to create a community for more 'hardcore' questions. Since the proposal was closed, the originator of this proposal has not become a contributor to Biology.SE and I'm not aware of any others from that potential community who joined, so the SE network lost a few dozen professional biologists.</p>

<p>I think both Biology.SE and the SE model in general are great. However, it seems that the fact that a high proportion of the community using Biology.SE consists of laymen could be discouraging professional biologists from joining. This does not affect the value of Biology.SE as a tool for public engagement but could limit its value as a tool for knowledge exchange.</p>

<p><strong>Does anyone else think this might be the case, and if so have any thoughts about what, if anything, we need to do about it?</strong></p>

<p>For example, one solution (although I don't really think it's a good one, it's just the first one I can think of) would be to set up a separate SE for biology professionals (ProfBio.SE?).</p>

<p>I have only arrived here recently, but it looks to me as though this has been a recurring issue: <a href="https://biology.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2877/shouldnt-we-be-more-tolerant-with-newcomers-and-non-biologists">Shouldn&#39;t we be more tolerant with newcomers and non-biologists?</a>, 
<a href="https://biology.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17/should-we-encourange-the-relevant-questions-from-non-professionals">Should we encourange the relevant questions from non-professionals?</a></p>
 10456: <p>I would like to point out that the existing data, while interesting, requires a few more pieces of information before we can make any conclusions about it. </p>

<p>Firstly, do we have any control graphs from other sites that are generally considered as "professional"? I gather that Math Overflow and Stack Overflow generally consist of professional programmers and mathematicians, so we should control for a known-professional site and a known-unprofessional site (Movies? SFF?) before we can make any conclusions. </p>

<p>It could be the fact that the SE model simply attracts many low-rep users to the site, especially if the site caters to a subject taught in schools, and there doesn't appear to be any causal link between a high-rep user and a professional. </p>

<p>Secondly, I feel that the graph has too low of a horizontal resolution. There are only a small handful of users with >10000 rep, myself excluded, and it would probably make more sense to plot the X axis as a semilogarithmic axis to show greater resolution. </p>

<p>Finally, the mere observation (as others have pointed out) that there are many unprofessional "junk" questions doesn't turn the site into a site for amateurs. Any SE site for school subjects would naturally attract large numbers of lazy schoolchildren looking for others to do their homework, and (as <a href="https://biology.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3440/10456">FoldedChromatin</a> has pointed out) this applies to students of programming too. We should, again, control for known-professional and known-amateur sites before we can make any conclusions. </p>
 25027: <p>To add another quality: Very tricky scientific questions usually seem met by a very opinionated belief that something is not possible (without people providing support for that belief). </p>

<p>Moreover I just looked at the chat and realized that some of the people with many points are using a very unprofessional language. </p>

<p>Also I am a bit grumpy that people (including a moderator) mistook a question of mine, which is quite close to a field of mine, to reflect ignorance or lack of understanding.</p>

<p>As I conclude that this site is not for professional (non-methodological) biological questions, I will discontinue using biology exchange, and discontinue recommending it to peers. </p>
 22057: <p>I agree that the number of very basic questions ( discourages professionals from joining. </p>

<p>How did I get here? I am a professional and only landed here because I do IT work, noticed SE Biology while using StackOverflow (where I generally go for answers to questions) and had a little time to kill. I am certainly not here to ask questions, as I can generally find the answers myself and those I couldn’t I would go to specialized forums for. (The only question I asked was in an area I know nothing — entomology — about the moths that invaded the Euro 2016 Final. Voted down immediately, despite it turning out to be a question with a very interesting answer. Actually, just this minute, got its first upvote.) </p>

<p>What did I think of the site when I arrived? Very poor overall — indeed awful compared with StackOverflow.</p>

<p>Why did I stay? Mainly because there were <em>a few</em> good question, and some other — even if naïve — that provoked me into thinking about some more basic aspects of areas I may have been involved in or taught. I also like to show people the wood when they are only looking at the trees.</p>

<p>But the key thing is that I am semi-retired, so I have the time. Given the general standard and the lack of practical utility I wouldn’t have spent time on this when I were still an active researcher. In my opinion, you will only get more professionals involved if standards are raised.</p>

<p>What to do about it? No really good suggestions. I do my bit both by voting to remove bad questions and by trying to help the posters find the answers themselves (and try to teach them how to write a proper title for a question) but some users of similar or higher reputation think I am too harsh/opinionated/arogant in this.</p>
 15807: <p>Let's be clear on this, Biology SE is (from the tour page):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Biology Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for biology researchers, academics, and students</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Coming to your first question</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think both Biology.SE and the SE model in general are great However, it seems that the fact that a high proportion of the community using Biology.SE consists of laymen could be discouraging professional biologists from joining.</p>
<p>Does anyone else think this might be the case, and if so have any suggestions to help?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I would like to highlight the part <strong>about the presence of layman questions discouraging professional biologists from joining</strong>. First of all, I think it is safe to say that professional biologists are already very capable of unravelling any conceptual dilemmas they may have. Secondly, conceptual dilemmas they may have are not always directly related to biology per se, but to related fields, such as statistics (cross validated SE), bioinformatics (SO, SU). Indeed, someone mentioned in the linked proposal that ecology was one of the top tags in Biology. I think this has a very strong relation as to why ecology questions are not scavenged anywhere else.</p>
<p>After all, if I have a possibility of garnering more views from more people working in the same or related field, then why shouldn't I post these questions there. Example are the tags <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/phylogeny">Phylogeny</a> and <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/blast">blast</a> on SO. Their existence on SO shows that questions which may be on Biology can get scavenged by some other site.</p>
<p>So I am of the view that &quot;Professional&quot; Biologists if they did join, would join for the fun of it (sating their curiosity) rather than asking questions whose answers they are quiet capable of figuring out for themselves. I visit the site for the same reason. <strong>I am not saying they will not ask questions, but them asking questions would not be the first reason for joining.</strong></p>
<p>So no I do not think that the presence of layman questions dissuades experts from joining.</p>
<hr />
<p>@James considers SO to be a successful SE example, and also states that Biology SE contains mostly garbage on the recents page. Because I visit the <code>awk</code> tag on SO, I would point you to the <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/awk">same</a>. That page as well at any given time of day contains mostly garbage by an expert's standard.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For example, one solution (although I don't really think it's a good one, it's just the first one I can think of) would be to set up a separate SE for biology professionals (ProfBio.SE?).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As I stated above, I think most questions professionals may have about their own fields will be highly specific and specialised, but others which they may have will be commonplace in a different field. For example I work in Chromatin Architecture, a question I may have on ProfBio.SE regarding Immunology will be rudimentary to an immunologist. So then should we have separate sites for Immunologists and Chromatin Architecture? No, that hardly makes sense. They should all be on biology SE.</p>
<p>I think this same problem is very commonplace in the other scientific communities. So If you ask me, I think there should be a super-category for the Sciences, such as Science SE, where laymen can ask their questions alongside students and other questions which may be deemed as &quot;stupid&quot;, while Biology SE is renamed to</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Biology Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for researchers and professionals working in biology</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Furthermore, I think using SO as a reference for biology is not correct. Because, I think being fluent in a programming language is much easier than building up pure academic knowledge and experience in an academic field.</p>
 15695: <p>Good question. It's always a good idea to now and then reflect on what our purpose and target audience is, as it often changes over time. Basically, I agree with the OP that biology SE is not really a site for professionals, at least not in the sense that professionals can come here and resolve actual research problems. But I'm not sure that will ever be feasible, and I don't think it means we need to change the site, because it does serve a function as it is.</p>

<p>I'm a cell biology / biochemistry professional and joined Biology SE a year ago. At the time I was curious if it might be a good network to shoot some out-of-the-box questions to other scientists, broaden my horizons a bit and discuss issues outside my own field of expertise. I have got some interesting feedback on my own broad-audience research questions, but mainly I have been engaged in answering more basic questions from students and the general public. And I think this is fine --- today I mainly view Biology SE as outreach activity, which I feel is a very important but often neglected task for academics.</p>

<p>I don't think we have critical mass as a forum for research-level questions from scientists, and I doubt we ever will achieve that. Biology is too large a research field, and fractioned into so many subfields, that asking a research-level question in any of them requires access to the handful of world experts that really knows what they're talking about. Most professionals ask those questions within their own network --- if I have a question on, say, mechanism of transcriptional regulation of the glutaminase enzyme by c-myc, I pick up the phone and call the local c-myc expert at the department next door. I don't expect to get an informed answer by shooting a question to a web forum or googling wikipedia. Most of the interesting answers (or rather advice and discussions) are not found in the published literature. A StackExchange site for the actual scientists might work for mathematics and computer science, but I think biology as an empirical discipline is quite different. (I think this is what Koustav Pal is saying as well in the other answer.)</p>

<p>This doesn't mean that Biology SE is not useful for scientists. While it is not a good channel for my own research questions, it is a good site for asking more general-purpose biology questions outside my own field, where I don't have expertise, out of pure curiosity. For example, I'm delighted to learn about weird species like the <a href="https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/6884/why-is-the-hydra-biologically-immortal">seemingly immortal hydras</a>, or that some women have a <a href="https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/7263/does-every-human-eye-see-the-same-visible-spectrum">fourth color receptor</a> in their retina. On Biology SE I encounter biology facts and ideas I otherwise would not have come across, and I think that is important for professional biologists today, as the subfields become ever more specialized and people risk losing sight of the larger questions.</p>

<p>But again, mostly this site handles rather basic questions from students and the general public, setting facts straight and clearing up fundamental misconceptions. And I think that's a worthwhile activity, and we should continue doing it. I think the description from the tour page that Koustav Pal is quoting, that Biology SE is "for biology researchers, academics, and students", is not really accurate in describing who is asking the most <em>questions</em> (that would be students and laymen, as the graph in the question suggests). But it is probably fairly accurate if it describes who is giving the most <em>answers</em>. And perhaps that's more important to describe, as it signals to a new would-be member that this is a site where he/she can get some informed answers to his/her questions. And most of the time, they do get well informed answers --- better than they would find otherwise --- and for free. That's not a bad outcome.</p>
