Re: Liblicense Feedback - Sage Publications

[David Goodman <dgoodman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>]

Useful as the aggregators are in some ways, those who thought that they
were buying journals rather than temporary access should now understand
the position--for Sage as well as other publishers

David Goodman
Research Librarian and
Biological Sciences Bibliographer
Princeton University Library
dgoodman@princeton.edu            609-258-7785

On Wed, 10 Jul 2002, Ann Okerson wrote:

> Comments from Carol Richman (carol.richman@sagepub.com)
> *******
>
> There has been much communication today regarding Sage's position with
> EBSCO and ProQuest and our participation in the database aggregated
> products produced by both companies.  I would like to clarify Sage's
> position:
>
> A Statement from Sage Publications:
>
> Sage Publications would like to clarify our position with respect to both
> EBSCO and ProQuest.  We have decided to remove our content from the
> aggregated databases known as EBSCOhost and ProQuest.  This decision is
> effective at the end of this year, but EBSCO and ProQuest will continue to
> fulfill subscriptions to their conclusion up until the end of 2003.  We
> have taken this decision, which we recognize will disappoint some in the
> library community, after almost 10 years of experimenting with aggregated
> databases.
>
> First, the increasing substitution of the databases for actual journal
> subscriptions jeopardizes the continued viability of our journal
> publishing program.  Journals cannot sustain themselves without income
> from subscriptions.  Unfortunately, the royalties earned from EBSCOhost
> and ProQuest are not substantial enough to support the cost of publishing
> a journal.  We would potentially be confronted with ceasing publication of
> a number of titles.  Decreasing the amount of available scholarly
> research will not serve the academic community well.
>
> Second, we believe that our current and future electronic publishing plans
> for Sage journals will provide great benefits to the library community, as
> we will describe below.  We want to ensure our customers that electronic
> access to all Sage journals will continue via our existing arrangements
> with Ingenta, Swets-Blackwell, Divine, Hans Huber, Minerva, OCLC, and
> EBSCO Online.  Thus, any institution that subscribes to a Sage journal
> will have electronic access, as we recognize that the availability of
> electronic content is critical to the academic community.
>
> Please know that we intend continued relationships with EBSCO, through
> EBSCO Online, and with ProQuest, through their microform/microfiche
> program.
>
> Additionally, Sage Publications has recently announced an exciting new
> online product for Sage journals, The Sage Full-text Collections, to be
> released in January 2003.  The Collections will be subject specific
> databases in the areas of Communication Studies, Criminology, Sociology,
> and Politics and International Relations. Each Collection will contain the
> full-text of all of the journals we publish in that discipline, including
> a current subscription and up to 20 years of back files with full linking
> backward and forward. Each Collection will be hosted on a platform
> enabling key word search functionality, browsing functionality, and
> reference and citation linking capability. The Collections are designed to
> be dynamic research tools for students and faculty members in the social
> sciences.  Sage currently plans to release new Collections in new
> disciplines each year.
>
> Sage has a long history of providing social science research to the
> academic community, and our goal and intention is to continue that
> tradition for librarians, faculty members, and students.  Please bear with
> us as we make the transition from EBSCOhost and ProQuest databases to Sage
> Full-Text Collections.