At two of the luncheons I attended, EBSCO revealed they now have an exclusive deal to provide the content of many of our most popular, popular magazines.
I could not find an official press release from EBSCO, so here is the story, as I understand it.
The publishers of a number of popular magazines, concerned that library users were accessing their content for free and not subscribing to their publications, sought a strategy to recover lost revenue.
They told the database vendors they were going to go with one, and only one aggregator and that they wanted a substantial price for their content.
The publishers solicited RFPs (requests for proposals) and EBSCO, at a very substantial cost, won the bid.
So EBSCO will now be the SOLE aggregator for such titles as:
* Time
* Time for Kids
* History Today
* People
* People Espanol
* Sports Illustrated
* Sports Illustrated for Kids
* US News & World Report
* Entrepreneur
* Forbes
* Fortune
* Harvard Business Review
* Kiplinger's Personal Finance
* Money
* Discover
* New Republic
* New Scientist
Valenza goes on to consider what this might mean for her and her library.
Btw, all of the events above took place at ALA Midwinter in Boston.
Today, Gale Cengage has published an open letter to the library community about this issue. You can access it here.
From the Letter:
Last summer, Gale publicly expressed our concerns over exclusive licensing agreements (the practice of "locking up" a periodical publisher's content with a single information provider) and asked you to join us in a conversation about the impact on libraries and on those whom libraries serve. Many librarians expressed agreement, via blog, Twitter and phone calls.
Nevertheless, another information provider, EBSCO, persists in a practice that drives up costs while limiting access to information, and chooses to mislead libraries as to their purpose. We'd like to set the record straight:
* EBSCO has a long history of proactively approaching publishers and offering to pay a premium for exclusive rights to distribute their publications in libraries, having done this for more than a decade with academic journals.
* Now EBSCO is pursuing the same strategy with mainstream news and business publications, having recently paid a premium to secure full control over the distribution of two major periodicals publishers: Time Inc. and Forbes.
* Contrary to statements from EBSCO, Gale did bid for this content, offering proposals consistent with our policy against exclusivity. In both proposals, Gale included language that would allow all information providers to retain these titles in their products. Gale also submitted bids well in excess of the publishers' asking price just to keep the content available for all libraries. As stated in our bid, our intent was to license to all vendors with equal terms, without creating an advantage to Gale. EBSCO bid higher, as they were intent on securing this content exclusively for their own products.
It continues with sections titled:
+ What Does This Mean For You
+ What You Can Do (Raising Your Voice, Pass the Letter Along, and Don't Reward the Behavior)
The letter is signed by John Barnes, Executive Vice President, Marketing & Business Development Gale, part of Cengage Learning.
"Based upon the titles that we understand to be on EBSCO’s list, we expect minimal impact for ProQuest customers. Most of these titles are freely available on the Web and we will help our customers integrate that Web content into their ProQuest databases -- just as librarians are saying they will do. We're not minimizing the interest in this content. In fact, ProQuest did pursue an agreement for these titles. In the end, we felt that the impact that such agreements would have on pricing, especially in this budget climate, was more than our customers could bear.”
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