Many, if not most, ebook platforms are adversarial to the health of libraries and intellectual freedom. One of the larger ebook platform companies is Clarivate so I want to use it for an example of how its business practices increasingly harm libraries.
A lot of librarians work in institutions with agreements for using Oasis, which is an online system from ProQuest (part of Clarivate). We use it for finding and ordering books for our collections. Few competitors exist to provide the set of services we access from Oasis. Recently, we librarians were abruptly faced with the impending loss of key parts of that system as the company decided to discontinue some of its services. There are many reasons why commercial ebook platforms are problematic, from their twisted and poor user interface designs to abuse of patron rights to gobbling of library resources (public funds), and more. I’m not writing about those things at the moment. I’m interested the relationship we have the vendor’s platform.
Companies like Clarivate have tacitly usurped control, both physically and intellectually, of library holdings. The companies use their platforms’ position as gateway to books (or other resources) in order to dominate and direct libraries’ capacities both for collection building and for providing ongoing access to the intellectual materials our patrons want or need. I’ll raise some disturbing things that can result from this loss of control but librarians must also bear some responsibility. We have collectively allowed this to happen. Here is some background.
When I acquire an ebook (for simplicity, I’ll talk about ebooks but it could be other types of electronic resources) I have to choose a particular company’s ebook platform to host it (although sometimes there is no choice) and I have to choose from a variety of licence or access right options. This means that prior to the purchase being submitted, I decide whether I want the file I’m “buying” to be accessible to one person at a time, three people at a time, or unlimited people. I have to decide whether they can only read on the designated platform or download the files. If they can download, then there’s a decision as to whether those files should be encumbered by digital restrictions management (DRM) technologies. Those choices restrict what people can read based on the technologies they either have available or choose to use. There are additional privacy and usability considerations involved with those choices.
In the previous paragraph, I used the word, buying, in quotation marks because in spite of the idea that the library is buying an ebook, we don’t possess it or control it. We buy print books and the control we maintain enables us to reliably provide access. We cannot fully do that with the majority of digital systems in the current environment.
With electronic resources, more often than not, we hand over money to a vendor and they give us a promise of sorts that the ebook will be accessible, sometimes supposedly in perpetuity. If we pay for that kind of licence, and if we continue to pay for them to host it. Yes, we “buy” books that are only allowed to be accessed from the servers controlled by these major publishing companies/ebook platforms. Agreements may have clauses about what would happen in the event that a company went out of business and in that case something might occur like enabling access to the books via a LOCKSS/CLOCKSS network. This is similar to something like a software code escrow agreement. You get a third party to securely hold on to the digital assets in the event of something really problematic happening with the licensor so that the licensee (or in this case, patrons/users) can still get access. LOCKSS helps to ensure ongoing digital preservation and access of e-resources; it’s an important and great thing. That all kicks in (in the type of scenario I’m referring to) when there is a trigger event like the publisher going out of business. It’s not intended for regular, everyday access prior to a trigger event.
We order and pay for an extremely expensive ebook licence (sometimes 3x or more than the cost of a print version) through Oasis (ProQuest/Clarivate), which comes laden with restrictions and requires ongoing regular fees for access from whichever hosting platform it’s on even if it is a perpetual licence. We are not permitted to host these on our own servers. This is at best renting, not buying.
We also buy most print books through Oasis. There is convenience to that. It enables more seamless visibility into the holdings we have vs. what we don’t, how we’re spending our funds, and the transfer of information for discovery features that our patrons use, among other things.
Mid-Feburary 2025, Clarivate made a surprising announcement. The gist was they would shortly end their service for ordering physical, print books as well as end the ability to “buy” ebooks in perpetuity. Via Clarivate’s ProQuest arm, they state:
“ProQuest Ebooks supports a new subscription-based strategy for Clarivate, which aims to break down barriers through broad and affordable access to highly curated, trusted academic resources. As part of this transformative strategy and following changes in demand from libraries, Clarivate will phase out one-time perpetual purchases of print books and ebooks…”
The print part is self-explanatory, we’ll find other sources to order from. The real crisis here unfolds from Clarivate/ProQuest’s move in the digital realm.
No more perpetual licences means they dropped the veneer of paying for ebooks as acquisitions. Now they only rent ebooks (subscription), which sounds like the end of any agreements that would enable a library to get permanent access to electronic books in the event of a company going out of business.
I do not believe in any way, shape, or form that libraries were demanding this. Libraries, generally underfunded and struggling, look for ways to decrease costs. Paying subscriptions that vendors increase constantly, for things that we do not own or control is the opposite of that. We never demand that.
Large companies like Clarivate have sewn-up ebooks into their proprietary platforms with few to no alternatives. Controlling the content and the platforms for accessing it, they have strategically diminished then usurped the value of the roles that libraries and librarians fill between users and providers/publishers. To a company like Clarivate, a library is a funnel of public funds. What Clarivate is transforming is its own ability to ingest those funds. They removed our ability to intelligently select the ebooks for our communities’ needs. Instead they will offer a bulk subscription. They removed our ability to ever have control over the digital files. Now they’ll offer us a subscription we can’t refuse. We will pay or else our community is out of luck. In my case, as an academic librarian, that would mean researchers cannot effectively do some research and students cannot get the information they need to learn.
There are other, more disturbing implications to their control. Even if we pay.
Because they have absolute control, if they decide not to offer a book, we might have no other way to obtain it. If they decide to remove a title from the subscription, our community loses out. If a researcher is relying on something, that person is at the mercy of this company to have its platform functional and the title accessible. Clarivate (and similar platforms) we know in principle that as a for-profit company, increasing profit will be their motivation. They are giving us a clear example of what that looks like. These are not entities to put ongoing trust in. Their goals are not about ensuring access to information. They will not care that every book has its reader.
More disturbing still is that their locus of control is based in a foreign country, subject to government decisions that may be at odds with our own legislation and are definitely contrary to ethical principles of librarianship.
Clarivate is headquartered in the United States, traded on a US stock market, doing business with its government, and it must be viewed in the context of the current political climate. We see regular news about the American government implementing censorship (particularly with respect to things they perceive as related to DEI). News about content being removed from websites. News about states working on laws that could criminalize librarians for doing our proper jobs. We’ve also seen a great deal of hostility from the current US government toward Canada. It is very easy to imagine a scenario in which the platform host removes access to books according to US government decisions. Although librarian professional codes of ethics require us to oppose censorship, we will have no recourse against these platforms in this scenario.
Early on I said that we, librarians, must bear some responsibility for this situation with the ebook vendors. We have been complacent in letting companies like Clarivate take away the control that is our duty to manage. We have let them build their platforms and we paid them for access because it was easy. They do it all and we pay a fee for that service. Perhaps early on this seemed a pragmatic strategy. Perhaps with our dwindling funds for collection-building and personnel, this seemed like the most expedient or feasible choice. It has proven a poor strategic choice.
In fact, we have developed our own systems, which are open and already up to the task of hosting all kinds of e-resources. Many of us have the know-how to do it and frequently libraries have systems already in place that might host ebooks. It requires some work but ultimately it might even cost us less than paying for on-going subscriptions. Even better, taking control of e-resources could enable a range of digital scholarship activities for researchers, which are impossible on vendors’ platforms.
I have heard arguments that libraries could never negotiate the rights to host all those ebooks ourselves but I’m skeptical. If we’ve already negotiated rights in the case of a trigger event causing the sort of escrow access I described previously, it’s not that different. We can pull more weight as members of large library consortia and if the vendors want that public money to continue to flow, they’ll need to negotiate. As librarians, I’d argue that it is both the ethical course of action and a professional responsibility that we should take back control.