UKB statement on Clarivate/Proquest’s announcement to stop selling single ebooks
On 18 February, Clarivate/ProQuest announced a new strategy entitled ‘transformative subscription-based access strategy’. Under this strategy, from 2026, only two major book packages will be offered as subscriptions, combined with an AI asset. This means that sales of single e-books with perpetual access will be completely discontinued. In addition, the ordering platform OASIS will disappear.
UKB shares global disappointment at these announced changes. The new strategy runs counter to UKB Libraries’ collection strategy, which aims to build permanent collections and promote library biodiversity. University libraries strive for sustainable collections that closely match their specific teaching and research profiles, which is severely hampered by such subscriptions. In addition, the UKB is concerned about the impact on smaller publishers, who will lose their distribution channel in the short term due to the disappearance of the ProQuest platform. This is detrimental not only to the publishers themselves, but also to the diversity of publications available.
UKB expects that Clarivate will adhere to the existing contractual agreements on perpetual access and continue to respect them in the future. UKB calls on publishers to offer their content through other platforms, so that libraries can decide for themselves how to acquire this content for their collections.
contact: ukb@uu.nl