Here is the official statement from Sage regarding its plans to pull journal
content from ProQuest and EBSCO. I pass it along for informational purposes
only, without any implication of personal or institutional endorsement.
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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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Rick Anderson
Director of Resource Acquisition
The University Libraries
University of Nevada, Reno "I'm not against the modern
1664 No. Virginia St. world. I just don't think
Reno, NV 89557 everything's for sale."
PH (775) 784-6500 x273 -- Elvis Costello
FX (775) 784-1328
rickand@unr.edu
