Last Saturday EBSCO held a luncheon at ALA in which they dropped several interesting bits of information. First, in all EBSCO products they'll be switching the default from date to relevancy ranking sometime in the Summer of 2010. You'll still be able to change this in the Admin interface, but something to be aware of.
Much bigger news is that EBSCO is about to be the exclusive full text content provider for a whole lot of popular magazines. Apparently the Major Magazines got together late last year and put out an RFP to the aggregators. The Major Magazines felt that they were losing subscribers because public library patrons were able to access their content w/o paying directly for a subscription, and the RFP suggested if the aggregators weren't willing to pay a lot more for their content, they were going to pull it all. EBSCO stepped forward and won all the bids, at great cost. This means that in the very near future the only place you'll be able to get the full text of the following publications (just a partial list from the pix I took of the slides) will be through EBSCO databases:
- Time
- History Today
- People
- Sports Illustrated
- US News and World Report
- Entrepreneur
- Forbes
- Fortune
- Harvard Business Review
- Kiplinger's Personal Finance
- Money
- Science (please see clarification)
- New Scientist
Apparently any provider that currently has full text content from these titles is losing it.
Has anyone seen an official announcement, or a complete list of publications involved? Oh, and if memory serves, there was a hint that because this cost EBSCO so much, you might expect to see some price increases this year.
Jan 20, 2010 update – here's a similar report from School Library Journal.
Comments
10 Responses to “EBSCO exclusive content”
Can anyone say monopoly? Locking up content and then raising prices while libraries are left out to dry. Nice move, EBSCO. I still won’t subscribe to your databases.
Here’s what @galecengage had to say at the time of the agreement — which I found out about when we lost online access to Consumer Reports:
http://blog.gale.com/sizzle/uncategorized/equity-of-access-join-the-debate/
Thanks for the link to that post Kevin – I had no idea this had been in the works for so long!
Further to this: EBSCO’s exclusivity over these titles will adversely affect unified discovery services, such as Summon and Primo. I got the distinct impression from EBSCO’s session on Saturday that a key strategy for them is to ensure that, ultimately, complete publications and, at the very least, the indexing and abstracting for countless products are available through their unified discovery service only (and perhaps through WorldCat Local, but only perhaps). This means that all other providers of such services would either have no access to any metadata or have to rely on title lists and, in cases of extreme luck, on full text for discovery of this content.
EBSCO Content Clarification and a Mea Culpa
This morning I received the following email from Susan at EBSCO Publishing (published with permission): Hi Paul, At ALA, EBSCO had a customer luncheon where we mentioned that our databases will have some newly unique content relative to other full-text…
I didn’t get the same impression, that EBSCO was also trying to lock up the metadata, though if they did I’d certainly agree that it would create problems for the unified discovery services!
Please read Gale’s open letter to the library community regarding the practice of exclusive licensing agreements.
http://www.gale.com/fairaccess/
Thanks for your active participation in this discussion.
– Harmony Faust (on behalf of Gale)
Shame on EBSCO. The more we can promote open access initiatives, the harder it will be for the Ebsco’s of the world to prevent the free flow of intellectual discourse
EBSCO’s Response to Gale’s Open Letter and Customer Questions
I received the following information from EBSCO this morning – a link to 3 PDF documents addressing some of the brouhaha over their ALA Midwinter announcement of exclusive magazine content. The URL indicates that may be a temporary location, so…
If this is reported correctly, it is interesting that publishers are blaming the loss of subscriptions of popular magazines on libraries. I was under the impression that most of their business was coming from the personal use market and not libraries. Would think that bad economy and its effects on households had more to do with their losses.