This morning I received the following email from Susan at EBSCO Publishing (published with permission):
Hi Paul,
At ALA, EBSCO had a customer luncheon where we mentioned that our databases will have some newly unique content relative to other full-text database vendors. There are many unique full-text publications in our databases. These can be due to exclusive or semi-exclusive licenses (sometimes referred to as “preferred” partnerships), or they can be “de facto” exclusives where the publisher does not have a formal contract preventing them from working with others, but chooses not to do so. While EBSCO is not in a position to provide details of our contracts with any specific publishers, nor able to issue a press release, I would like to attempt to clear up some of the confusion that exists.
There have been numerous blog postings by librarians, including some with great detail, pertaining to the unique and soon-to-be-unique content in EBSCOhost full-text databases. I have actually been amazed by the specificity of these blogs, and although most of the information is correct, some of it is not. For example, Science has incorrectly been listed as unique to EBSCO full-text databases, but as far as I know, Science is not available via any full-text database, including any of EBSCO’s. There were also some generalizations made that are true for many, but not all, publishers of the content discussed. In addition, many unique or soon-to-be-unique publications were NOT listed in those blogs. We are not going to publish a list of unique magazines or journals, but we are willing to do customized comparisons for each library to show which publications would be gained (or retained) by adding (or keeping) EBSCO databases.
With regard to academic journals, EBSCO’s active full-text coverage is overwhelmingly superior to databases from other vendors and this is recognized by most libraries worldwide. The new discussion centers around general magazines, which is where many of the recent changes have taken place or are about to take place. As a company, we feel strongly that journals and magazines are among the most important sources for research and we have worked hard to ensure that our databases contain the best possible collections for our customers. Although a major investment, we believe our efforts and actions will preserve access to important publications for the majority of libraries worldwide and provide the best possible research experience for end users.
Regards,
Susan Entrican
EBSCO Publishing
As part of my response I indicated that I had taken my list of journals that I had published earlier this week from a series of cruddy photos I snapped with my iPhone (crappy 3G camera), including this one, from which I took the title Science:
Susan wrote back to point out that Science in this case is the category of magazines being addressed on this page, and not the name of the publication, so I've removed Science from the list on my previous post and am now tracking down other bloggers who've reproduced my list to ask them to modify as well.
Here are the rest of the shots I took; if only the Science one had been as clear :-( Sorry about that, EBSCO and readers.
update: Feb 5, 2010: A publisher has requested I don't show the cover images w/o explicit permission, so I have blurred the cover images in the shots above.