Liblicense Feedback - Sage Publications

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Comments from Carol Richman (carol.richman@sagepub.com)
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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.

For further information, contact Carol Richman: carol.richman@sagepub.com.
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