Last week, Paul Pival at the Distant Librarian blog mentioned that EBSCO announced at the ALA Midwinter meeting that it had secured a deal with some magazine publishers that would give EBSCO exclusive full text access to a handful of publications. Among the publications that Pival learned will be solely found in EBSCO products are:
- Time
- History Today
- People
- Sports Illustrated
- US News and World Report
- Entrepreneur
- Forbes
- Fortune
- Harvard Business Review
- Kiplinger’s Personal Finance
- Money
- Science
- New Scientist
I just got a mass email from Gale that is also freely available on the web in which Gale decries EBSCO’s actions. A number of other librarians have written about this issue in the past few days as well: Dorothea Salo, Colleen Harris, and Joyce Valenza.
It is worth remembering here the exclusive deal that Harvard Business Review had struck with EBSCO that prevents EBSCO customers from creating stable URLs to records for HBR articles. For details on that, read Paul Pival’s posts on his Distant Library blog and Peter Murray’s post on his Distributed Library Technology Jester blog.
An EBSCO rep contacted Paul Pival to point out that Science is not part of the deal. See Pival’s post for details and what EBSCO has to say about the whole matter of exclusive content. Also see Norman Oder’s article in Library Journal today for Proquest’s take on the issue.