A Master Class in Destroying Trust

This article represents the author’s personal views, not those of her employer.

On February 18, 2025, Clarivate announced that as part of its “transformative strategy and following changes in demand from libraries” it would “phase out one-time perpetual purchases of print books” and ebooks on ProQuest’s Ebook Central platform. It would also end new perpetual archive license purchases of digital collections.

The removal of perpetual purchases from Clarivate’s sales models runs counter to library values of long-term preservation and access to information. Subscriptions might work for some libraries, but perpetual purchases are important for the preservation of the written record, especially at research institutions.

In the weeks that followed the announcement, librarians (including Siobhan Haimé and Isaac Wink) lamented the end of ownership; the loss of stable access; and the loss of a primary supplier for shelf-ready print books. They shared concerns about their ability to afford new subscriptions, the need to shift collection development strategies, and Clarivate’s fast timeline. Many pointed to Clarivate’s February 19, 2025 earnings call for 2024 Q4, which clearly articulated their goal to increase the bottom line. This was the “value creation plan (VCP)” Clarivate announced in late 2024 coming to fruition. Library and higher education consortia sent letters to Clarivate; libraries met with Clarivate, and with each other. EBSCO, a direct competitor, quickly reaffirmed its commitment to offering a variety of purchase options for libraries.

On March 4, two weeks after the initial announcement, Clarivate’s CEO, Matti Shem Tov, and president for academia and government, Bar Veinstein, issued an open letter to the library community in which they apologized that “the absence of community consultation created frustration, during already challenging times for libraries and higher education.” They also announced that Clarivate would delay the implementation date for the planned changes and guarantee perpetual access for previously purchased materials.

This response—a delay in implementation that ignores the library community’s deeper critique of the plan—rings hollow.

As we plan our next steps, we should reflect on how we got here.

Building a Community

In June 2007, I found myself in Spearfish, South Dakota at my first Ex Libris Users of North American (ELUNA) conference.

Formed in 2006 from the merger of two previous user groups, ELUNA is a not-for-profit organization representing Ex Libris customers in the Americas. Ex Libris develops and sells library software and management solutions like Alma, an integrated library management system used by over 2,500 libraries worldwide.

ELUNA members test and advocate for improvements to the Ex Libris products and have created a community of support for each other. ELUNA has a steering committee, eighteen working groups, four advisory groups, and seven communities of practice composed of staff from subscribing institutions; they interact directly with staff from Ex Libris. Over the past 20 years, through my institutions’ involvement in ELUNA, I’ve improved, conceptualized, and developed features for Ex Libris products.

At my first ELUNA conference, I was awed by how many libraries and library staff were users of and experts in Ex Libris tools and systems. I was also struck by how closely ELUNA attendees and member institutions collaborated with Ex Libris staff. Ex Libris leaders, product managers, developers, and customer support and service staff attend the ELUNA conference, where they lead trainings and give presentations.

Over the years, Ex Libris executives (including, during their tenures there, Shem Tov and Veinstein) often used the conference to announce and explain the rationale for new products or other major business decisions. During Q&A sessions, ELUNA members shared opinions—sometimes passionate—directly with Ex Libris staff and executives. There was a high level of collaboration and information-sharing between ELUNA member institutions, their staff, and Ex Libris employees.

The process of collaboration was not always smooth and didn’t always work out as ELUNA members preferred, but we worked with Ex Libris to make things happen and felt like a valued community.

A Shifting Tide

In October 2015, ProQuest, which had its own long history as a key provider of digitized primary materials and aggregator of research databases, ebooks, and streaming videos, acquired Ex Libris. This was a seismic transition for academic libraries. But despite fretting about what the acquisition would mean for both companies and their lines of products, from the outside, things seemed okay: There was some consolidation—for example, of customer support desks—but the products themselves didn’t change. Ex Libris retained its moniker, adding “A ProQuest Company” to its logo and branding. Several Ex Libris executives—including Shem Tov and Veinstein—made their way into ProQuest leadership.

And then, in late 2021, ProQuest was acquired by Clarivate.

Though Clarivate’s current leadership—including Shem Tov and Veinstein—have a strong history of collaborating with their customers, they didn’t consult with libraries or publishers before their February 18 announcement. Clarivate’s failure to involve their customers in this decision, especially those in government and academia, shows that they prioritized profit over relationships.

The exclusion of libraries was intentional, not an oversight. In a moment when university budgets are facing profound and intense technological, financial, and governmental pressures, Clarivate’s fast and furious timeline—even with a slight reprieve—is out of touch.

Vendors and publishers seek to make money. Library professionals promote the freedom to read and unfettered access to content. Of course the goals of vendors and library professionals can be in conflict. And yet, in our work with vendors, as exemplified in my experience with ELUNA—a service provided by libraries and their employees to a corporation, in the form of a nonprofit, which we described as a community—it has at times been easy to feel as if we all share a commitment to libraries and librarianship.

We do not.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Clarivate is omnipresent on academic campuses, although it is not alone. And, like other large content and information services providers, it has shifted its focus. In an article about Elsevier and its parent company, RELX, Christien Boomsma writes, “Publishing is no longer the main focus for RELX and its competitors; instead, they have become data brokers. They sell data to insurance companies for risk analysis, to banks for fraud detection, to universities to assess their performance, and, especially egregious, to the US Immigration Service to target illegal immigrants.” In addition to a new focus on data, Clarivate is investing heavily in artificial intelligence, an indicator of expected market and revenue gains.

Clarivate’s dismissal of one-time purchases is alarming, but when you consider the company’s larger strategy, it makes sense. On the Q4 earnings call, Shem Tov refers to one-time purchases as “a drain.” He also says that Clarivate has “retained financial advisers to help us in evaluating strategic alternatives to unlock value. This may include divesting business units or an entire segment.” He goes on to say, “There is no guarantee that anything actionable will arise from this process,” but considering Clarivate will no longer sell books, Clarivate’s furthering its investment in data should make us wary.

Going forward, libraries and library staff should approach vendors with absolute clarity about the values governing our respective work and the nature of our relationships. We must:

Increase bibliodiversity in the market and our collections (Haimé) by:

• Purchasing materials directly from smaller and/or more diverse publishers
• Investing in academy-owned open access infrastructure and publishing that is sustainable, equitable, and diverse
• Investigating alternative software, tools, and content providers; consider developing options in-house (or in collaboration with other institutions)
• Divesting from resources that no longer serve our needs or align with our values

Speak up by:

• Sharing concerns with library leadership
• Pushing vendors on issues that conflict with our values
• Requesting meetings with vendor leadership

Use our collective voices to:

• Discuss issues with institutional, system, regional, consortia, or association groups
• Bring shared concerns to vendors, collectively
• Reclaim our space; insist on being at the table (especially concerning the development of AI-integrated tools and the use of data collected about our institutions or our users)
• Set guiding principles for interacting with publishers and vendors

Incorporate limitations into signed agreements. Make sure to:

• Get everything in writing, via a contract
• Limit vendors’ use of the data they collect from our users and institutions

Offer library staff training on:

• Current vendor issues and trends with vendors
• Ethics and conflicts of interest

We should remain open to collaboration but remember that profit drives many of the companies libraries rely on. Even in the face of great challenges and unbelievable changes, we can and should continue to advocate for our core values.