The ERIL (Electronic Resources in Libraries) email list contains a good discussion thread on Sage's decision to remove all its full text journals from EBSCO. EBSCO's response has been to look for non-profit journals to replace the Sage content, which is helpful. EBSCO can be forgiven for trying to minimize the damage to its journal aggregate caused by Sage's decision, but it minimizes the damage so much that it treats scholarly journals as if they were fungible and starts to sound like a late-night TV commercial for sofa-sized paintings. Are journals with equivalent embargo periods or back runs really equivalent? If scholarly journals really were fungible, then the serials pricing crisis would disappear and the FOS movement would triumph overnight —libraries would only have to replace expensive journals with "equivalent" free journals.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/10/2002 02:44:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
