I received the following information from EBSCO this morning - a link to 3 PDF documents addressing some of the brouhaha over their ALA Midwinter announcement of exclusive magazine content. The URL indicates that may be a temporary location, so here are direct links to local copies:
- EBSCO's Response to Gale's Open Letter
- ICOLC Questions with EBSCOs Answers
- ASL Question and EBSCO Answer
The first is a 1-page rebuttal of Gale's "Open Letter to the Library Community" posted earlier this week, "where Gale repeatedly references EBSCO and mischaracterizes our actions and intentions." Second is a 2-page document responding to questions posed to EBSCO by The International Coalition of Library Consortia in which you'll find a bigger list of titles in question (including, shockingly, Teddy Bear & Friends!). And finally, a brief response to Gladys Ann Wells, State Librarian of Arizona, who asked If EBSCO is the only vendor doing exclusive licenses. ("No. In fact, we weren’t the first and we see them being signed all the time by other vendors, with little or no media coverage.")
I wish we could easily track the going price of these aggregators - in response to questions about whether EBSCO will be raising prices to pay for their new exclusive content, Sam Brooks of EBSCO snipes at Gale, wondering "Now that they no longer have to pay for many very important publications, it will be interesting to see if they will be providing substantial discounts to their existing customers."
