Last week, EBSCO Publishing and the H.W. Wilson Company announced a merger of the two, ostensibly with Wilson being consumed by the behemoth that is EBSCO. Frankly, I’m not surprised. Several years ago when Wilson pulled their indexes out of the aggregators to create and market their own databases on their own platform, I knew it would either save the company or be their downfall.
I don’t know the details of what went into the acquisition, but I do know that WilsonWeb was a half-baked product when it went to market, and in my not-so-humble opinion, it hasn’t significantly improved over the years. The best thing for libraries and researchers would be to move the high quality Wilson indexes onto a modern aggregator database search platform that I won’t be embarrassed to put out there for our users.
In other EBSCO news, they sent out a press release this week regarding The Economist and their bid for a semi-exclusive contract. EBSCO declined the offer, so as of June 30th next year, the full-text coverage of The Economist will be removed and only abstract/index content will remain in EBSCO’s products. I suspect that more big name publications may try to do the same, and this concerns me slightly.
My main issue with full-text of The Economist not being in our EBSCO databases in the future is not so much that I want it there as it is I want it available electronically. Currently, The Economist does not offer an institutional subscription or any sort of IP-based access for their online platform. We do not subscribe to or have plans to subscribe to the resources that will supposedly continue to have full-text content from The Economist, so I hope that they get their act together and start providing institutional subscriptions.
Kind of ironic that just a few weeks ago The Economist published an article that tut-tutted academic publishers for being too mercenary in their pricing structures. Maybe they’re just jealous they didn’t think of it first?
