There is no end to the ways that publishers monetize digital access to knowledge for the good of, well, publishers.  Latest in a long line is Clarivate Plc, who recently unveiled a ‘transformative subscription-based access strategy for academia’.  They claim that the approach ‘enables broad, simple and affordable access to trusted scholarly content for learning and research’ – more of this later.  But how are they achieving this?  Their ‘transformative’ strategy is to make all access a subscription service.  As they said in a corporate announcement on Feb 18  2025, ‘Clarivate will … phase out one-time perpetual purchases of digital collections, print and digital books for libraries. These transitions will take place throughout 2025, in close co-operation with customers’ (my italics).  Siobhan Haimé’s trenchant piece in the UKSG Newsletter summarises succinctly the fairly massive changes for university libraries:

• The cessation of one-time perpetual purchases for eBooks through Ebook Central by 31-10-2025. Titles already purchased will remain accessible under their existing terms.

• The cessation of print book sales through both OASIS and Rialto by 31-08-2025.

  • Open orders for out-of-stock or back-ordered titles will be cancelled on 31-07-2025.

• The sunsetting of the OASIS marketplace by 31-12-2025.

• Demand-driven acquisition (DDA) will no longer be supported. Existing programs will run until 31-10-2025, but no new set-ups will be approved.

• Rialto will only provide publisher-direct and aggregator platform eBooks going forward. It is set to “expand to offer enhanced collection development capabilities and workflows”. What exactly this means is unclear as of yet.

What was the response?  Cue polite uproar from HE libraries.  Best protests are Siobhan Haimé’s piece above, Kevin O’Donovan’s post on the LSE blog, and Marydee Ojala’s in Information Today Europe for general context and update.

Faced with this, on March 4 appeared a somewhat abashed Clarivate update, ‘Our letter to the library community‘, in which the corporation acknowledges in typical corporate-speak that it got the messaging wrong but the message was still the great news it trumpeted in its first attempt, just tweaked and delayed and explained a bit more.  So much for the vaunted ‘close co-operation with customers’.

From Clarivate’s point of view, the key issue is that pesky concept of the ‘one-time perpetual purchase’.  I used to call it buying a book.  I would own it, for always – not its content in an IP sense of course, but the book itself.  Clarivate wants to put an end to that nonsense for their library customers.  In place of the one-time perpetual purchase they want to enable ‘broad, simple and affordable access to trusted scholarly content for learning and research’.  Here’s a translation, or shall we call it a clarivication, of what the words really mean in the lexicon of Clarivate:

broad
We’re gonna compel every library to pay up for stuff via subscriptions.

simple
Investment in an Amazon-style one portal to rule them all that will doubtless collect massive data on customers, deliver max profit, and operate way better than that clunky OASIS software of ProQuest (who owns ProQuest now, btw?  ah yes you’ve guessed it – Clarivate)

affordable access
This is classic 1984 Ministry of Truth, aka Trumpspeak.  There’s a BIG problem with affordability for our libraries, every scholarly body has been saying so for years – so Clarivate just calls it affordable to make its monopolistic practices sound acceptable.  And, they say to libraries, in addition to subscriptions you’ll buy bundles whether you like it or not.  And look, John, look, it’s got AI widgets too.

trusted scholarly content
Mmm, let’s just stop for a moment here and clarivate: who makes trusted scholarly content?  Not Clarivate.  We scholars make it so.  And we do it for virtually free.  Neither us nor the institutions that employ us charge publishers a one-time perpetual purchase or a subscription fee for our services.  Sure we get royalties, but at risibly low rates that’s nothing like the return that publishers now earn off the massive content we create and the quality processes we undertake.  In return, info megacorps like Clarivate circulate our work for profit, then charge us for access to it, then charge our libraries for it, then charge everyone else for e-access via never-ending subscriptions, the prices of which only ever go one way.  Clarivate has nothing to do with trust in the matter of scholarly content: it feeds off scholarly content.

for learning and research
Whose learning & whose research?  Those lucky enough to belong to an institution with Clarivate subscriptions.  Under the subscription model everyone else is barred from such knowledge – unless you pay a subscription. And that also includes learners who have been students and moved on, or faculty who have worked in such institutions and now moved on.  Clarivate erects massive barriers to knowledge and understanding.

You might say, this is all at the level of corporations and institutional libraries.  But there’s a profoundly personal dimension to these narratives of corporate take-over that affects us all.  When I was a schoolboy I used to wander into John Smith’s bookshop in St Vincent Street in Glasgow.  I was studying Latin and Greek, and fascinated by the literatures, histories, cultures, biographies beyond the necessary learning of grammar, vocab, etc.  I wanted to read much more of it in translation than I could understand from my classes.  I went to the Penguin Classics translations section, with their lines of handsome paperbacks, black with ancient art work on the cover, good introductions, scholarly translators, accessible to a schoolboy.  I began making what Clarivate would call multiple one-time perpetual purchases.  Over 50 years later I can remember where exactly in the bookshop those shelves were, remember the quiet excitement of drifting among them, learning so much even as I stood and browsed.  It took an Arts undergrad degree at Glasgow University to understand how formative those experiences were, and to understand that what I’d been doing as a boy was the start of a scholarly life, the way scholars had been doing since the very start of European universities in the eleventh century.

The shop itself is now long gone now (though the brand continues as Scots university bookshops).  As an independent city bookshop it was a moment in the constant churn of text capitalism that began with moveable type in the west.  Its disappearance is a reminder that there was always economic instability for publishers and booksellers – eg the number of entrepreneurial printers and their shops that opened up in Venice in the fifteenth century incunabula period, and just as quickly folded.

But it enabled me and millions of others to begin collecting that most precious of things, a personal library, that has stayed with me in moves from rented accommodation to family homes, 10 moves in total to date, sometimes building bookcases to house it.  Like many other key texts in my life – Auerbach’s Mimesis, Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, Ellmann’s life of Yeats, Benjamin’s Illuminations, edited by Arendt, Arendt’s The Human Condition – those volumes became dear to me, some just for occasional reference, some battered, falling apart under constant re-readings, the pages of others crowded with marginalia. I boxed them for moves, unboxed them (following Benjamin’s essay on Unpacking my Library), arranged them on shelves because they are me, part of my intellectual life. I cherished them, still do.  Clarivate represents the very opposite of this personal intellectual tradition of knowledge.  Like Elsevier and many others, Clarivate has no motivation to open access to this knowledge.  It wants to put up barriers to the dissemination of knowledge.  Who benefits, then?  Not the schoolboy Paul, not the millions of us that seek access to and try to understand truly transformative intellectual traditions that are millennia in the making; and certainly not our university libraries, centuries in the making.  Clarivate’s shareholders – that’s who benefit.

What can be done?  Siobhan Haimé has it right:

This may signal the moment to increase (international) collaboration towards open-access initiatives and collective action. With recent developments around journals, a match has been lit and — whilst not in the way intended — this strategy shift may prove transformative for our approach to books as well. So perhaps my earlier scepticism of this being ‘transformative’ was incorrect. This strategy may prove to be transformative if we take this as an opportunity to radically explore alternative models to protect equitable access. Our response to these changes may shape the future of academic library collections for years to come – and hopefully for the better.

I agree.  In the academy we’ve been far too equivocal, or maybe slothful is more accurate, about this issue – I’ve written about it before on this blog (just search ‘Elsevier’).  We need to explore those ‘alternative models’ and move away from subscription servitude.