Feature
Subscription agents: Rebecca Pool asks who will survive the seismic shifts in scholarly publishing circles
It’s no secret that life for the subscription agent hasn’t been easy. Within several years of the arrival of online journals, most publications became available on the Internet, packaged up and sold in multi- year agreements, bypassing many of the services that agents traditionally provided. What’s more, this bundling of content
increasingly saw publishers and librarians completely omitting subscription agents and sealing deals direct. Factor in dwindling library budgets, the emergence of open access, the much-covered collapse of Swets, and the traditional subscription agent has, at best, been floundering. ‘The real point of subscription agents was in the days of print when you were taking hundreds of copies of a journal from a publisher and splitting these up for many different libraries,’ says Mark Carden, chairman of the ‘Researcher to
Reader’ conference, which succeeded the annual conference from the now-dissolved Association of Subscription Agents. ‘So, in many ways, the raison d’être of subscription agents has disappeared – especially with the arrival of electronic publications.’ Yet, several survivors have adapted.
US-based information services provider, EBSCO, for one, has long embraced the steady shift from scholarly print to electronic publications. As Gareth Smith, vice president of sales in the UK and the Nordics, points out, in the late 1980s, more than 88 per cent of orders placed by EBSCO on behalf of academic libraries were for print materials. Yet in 2016, 80 per cent of orders were for online publications only. ‘We processed more than 5,000
e-journals package orders last year on behalf of client libraries,’ says Smith. Monika Schneider, director of publisher
relations and sales, Europe, at Germany- based book acquisitions and subscriptions services provider, Harrassowitz, tells a similar story. ‘We have been dealing with electronic publications for years and these have been a major part of our business and revenue stream,’ she asserts. We believe there is not a subscription agent anymore, as once there might have been. Agents now provide a variety of different
services in different combinations, and serving different markets.’ Indeed, diversification has been crucial
to success of the likes of EBSCO and Harrassowitz. EBSCO formed EBSCO Publishing as early as the 1980s, which marked the advent of its transition from sole subscription agent to more general intermediary. Research internet platform, EBSCOhost,
followed in the 1990s, in line with the first moves towards electronic publications, and the company also claims to have delivered one of the first cloud services, now offering EBSCO Discovery Service and EBSCOhost apps. ‘We have offered e-books and audio
books for libraries since 2010 and in 2014 we launched our digital replica platform that now offers library access to more than 1,200 titles,’ highlights Smith. ‘In 2015 YBP Library Services joined EBSCO so we could offer monographs to our existing suite of serials database and software offerings... and we are also part of the Future of Libraries is Open [FOLIO] initiative to develop an open source platform for libraries.’
“Diversification has been crucial to success of the likes of EBSCO and Harrassowitz”
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February/March 2017 Research Information
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