Information Access Alliance Takes Action on Proposed Wiley Acquisitionof Blackwell

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Of possible interest.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2006 15:44:58 -0500
From: ARL Communications <commlmgr@arl.org>
To: Activities and Programs of ARL <ARL-ANNOUNCE@arl.org>
Subject: Information Access Alliance Takes Action on Proposed
    Wiley Acquisition of Blackwell

INFORMATION ACCESS ALLIANCE TAKES ACTION ON PROPOSED WILEY ACQUISITION OF
BLACKWELL

John Wiley and Sons recently announced its plans to acquire 
Blackwell Publishing, a publisher of scientific, technical, and 
medical (STM) journals, for a price of $1.08 billion. This 
increase in concentration in an already concentrated market is 
cause for substantial concern on the part of the library 
community. The combined company will control more than 1,200 
titles, many of them scholarly society journals.

The Information Access Alliance (IAA), representing the 
Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the American Library 
Association, the Association for College and Research Libraries, 
the American Association of Law Libraries, the Medical Library 
Association, SPARC, and the Special Library Association, wrote to 
the US Department of Justice on November 29 asking that they act 
to issue a second request for information from the two companies 
and review the market and the merger. The IAA letter to the 
Department of Justice is available on the Web 
http://informationaccess.org/wiley.blackwell.pdf.

The IAA is deeply concerned that this transaction will exacerbate 
market dysfunctions and result in further reduction in access to 
critical research information that fuels the entire higher 
education and research enterprise.� Both John Wiley and Sons and 
Blackwell Publishing currently use bundled pricing models; a 
recent study by ARL gathered data from its member libraries 
documenting that bundling practices reduce customer choice, hurt 
small publishers, and create barriers to entry (see 
http://www.arl.org/newsltr/245/bundle.html).

Information on publisher mergers and related antitrust issues is 
available on the Information Access Alliance Web site 
http://www.informationaccess.org/.

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Kaylyn Hipps
Managing Editor, Web Content
Association of Research Libraries
21 Dupont Circle NW #800
Washington DC 20036
tel: 202.296.2296 x103
fax: 202.872.0884

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