|
Marknadslogiken har åter slagit till. Stora tidskriftspaket blir större.
Amerikanska bibliotek
protesterar:
INFORMATION ACCESS ALLIANCE TAKES ACTION ON PROPOSED WILEY ACQUISITION OF
BLACKWELL
John Wiley and Sons recently announced its plans to acquire Blackwell
Publishing, a publisher of scientific, technical, and medical (STM)
journals, for a price of $1.08 billion. This increase in concentration
in an already concentrated market is cause for substantial concern on
the part of the library community. The combined company will control
more than 1,200 titles, many of them scholarly society journals.
The Information Access Alliance (IAA), representing the Association of
Research Libraries (ARL), the American Library Association, the
Association for College and Research Libraries, the American Association
of Law Libraries, the Medical Library Association, SPARC, and the
Special Library Association, wrote to the US Department of Justice on
November 29 asking that they act to issue a second request for
information from the two companies and review the market and the merger.
The IAA letter to the Department of Justice is available on the Web
http://informationaccess.org/wiley.blackwell.pdf.
The IAA is deeply concerned that this transaction will exacerbate market
dysfunctions and result in further reduction in access to critical
research information that fuels the entire higher education and research
enterprise. Both John Wiley and Sons and Blackwell Publishing currently
use bundled pricing models; a recent study by ARL gathered data from its
member libraries documenting that bundling practices reduce customer
choice, hurt small publishers, and create barriers to entry (see
http://www.arl.org/newsltr/245/bundle.html).
Information on publisher mergers and related antitrust issues is
available on the Information Access Alliance Web site
http://www.informationaccess.org/.
--
<html>
<font size=3>Jan Szczepanski<br>
Förste bibliotekarie<br>
Goteborgs universitetsbibliotek<br>
Box 222<br>
SE 405 30 Goteborg, SWEDEN<br>
Tel: +46 31 773 1164 Fax: +46 31 163797<br>
E-mail: [log in to unmask]<br><br>
</font></html>
|
