EBSCO Acquires Ten Sage Indexes

Company also adding images to EBSCOhost, partnering with Elsevier for ebooks, and aiding developing nations

By Michael Rogers -- Library Journal, 9/1/2007

In the current climate of great transition and buyouts among so many of the premiere players in the library automation market, EBSCO has maintained course, growing continually while remaining independent. The company has expanded its offerings—16,000 e-journals and ten million articles are now available to users—through partnerships and purchases.

This autonomy has allowed the company to keep its executive staff intact while so many other long-familiar faces among the library vendors have drifted away. EBSCO Publishing, the division that owns and operates EBSCOhost, in fact, has retained its top executives for more than 12 years (President Tim Collins has been on board for 23 years; Sam Brooks, senior sales and marketing VP, 16 years). Very few, if any others in this field, can match this feat.

EBSCO told LJ exclusively that it has purchased ten of Sage Publications’ top indexes. “The deal [brings] the leading abstract journals in their fields to users electronically through the EBSCOhost platform,” the company said. The titles are:

• Abstracts in Social Gerontology™
• Educational Administration Abstracts™
• Human Resources Abstracts™
• Peace Research Abstracts (formerly, Peace Research Abstracts Journal™)
• Sage Family Studies Abstracts (now called Family Studies Abstracts™)
• Sage Public Administration Abstracts™ (now called Public Administration Abstracts™)
• Sage Race Relations Abstracts™ ™ (now called Race Relations Abstracts)
• Sage Urban Studies Abstracts™ ™ (now called Urban Studies Abstracts)
• The Shock & Vibration Digest™
• Violence & Abuse Abstracts™

Currently, each index is available in print only. Online versions, including back files and other functionality, such as unlimited use, remote accessibility, multidatabase searching, links to full text, etc., are expected to be available by October 2007.

The company also is striving to make EBSCOhost more image-oriented at no extra charge to users, who will begin seeing graphics in results lists.

Along with the Sage purchases, EBSCO has added two more partners. The company has joined with Elsevier for a mountain of ebooks: 4000 STM-focused texts, including titles from Pergamon and Academic Press (50 new titles will be added monthly); more than 50 reference works from broad-based to highly specialized; handbook series in the fields of economics, mathematics, physics, and chemistry; and seven book series covering everything from business, management, and economics to the social sciences.

Additionally, EBSCO and PureWellness, a top provider of resources for online health and wellness portals, have cut a deal to incorporate the former’s Health Library database into the latter’s eWellness platform. Health Library covers medical-related information in layperson’s terms.

Little known is the company’s philanthropic side. Brooks told LJ that EBSCO has more than 50 national licenses, mostly with developing nations, that offer service to students, faculty, and other researchers in these countries, charging just enough to cover costs.

“In the cases of some remote nations and truly underdeveloped countries,” said Brooks, “these databases, like Academic Search Premier, Business Source Premier, and others, catapult each university’s journal collection from a handful of serials to the point where they are on a par with the journal collections of some universities in Western Europe that do not have these databases. We work very closely with some remarkable organizations, such as the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications, in addition to the ministries of culture, science and technology, education, etc., within many nations.”

EBSCO’s publishing collaborators also benefit by gaining international exposure to their journals in places where they may have little to no market penetration. “It’s truly a situation,” said Brooks, “where the efforts of various entities are uniting to provide a powerful informational and educational force in the lives of large groups of people who only a few years ago had nothing close to this type of content accessibility.”