Re: Liblicense Feedback - Sage Publications

[Bonnie MacEwan <bjm@psulias.psu.edu>]

Dear Ms. Richman,

I hope you considered the possibility that your decision to remove the
content of your journals from the most often used indexes and journal
access mechanism for the primary users of your content will endanger the
viability of your journals.  If no one is reading or using the articles it
will eventually occur to the library community that we don't need them.
We're often slow to cancel so you miss the connection but I believe this
will be the eventual outcome.  I don't mean this as a threat.  I offer it
as an observation of the long term outcome of your decision.

Bonnie MacEwan


At 06:24 PM 7/10/02 -0400, you 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.