More details about the Scientific American Archive Online discontinuation

By Jayne Dickson, CDL Information Services Analyst

As reported earlier this month, the Scientific American Archive Online (SAAO) will no longer be available after May 31, 2010.  See Scientific American Archive (EBSCO) to be Discontinued by Publisher on May 31, 2010 for more information.  Campuses will not lose access to the online content completely as selected articles from current issues of Scientific American (ISSN 0036-8733), Scientific American Mind (ISSN 1555-2284), and Scientific American Special Edition (ISSN 1524-0223) will continue to be available in EBSCOhost’s  Academic Search Complete database.

However, what IS being lost is several years of online content along with the preferred article format.  For Scientific American, content from 1/1/1993 – 12/31/2004 will not be available in Academic Search Complete.

Of more importance to users may be the loss of the PDF article format.  Currently, in the Scientific American Archive Online, complete cover-to-cover full text is displayed in PDF format in full color and including all photographs, images, charts included in the print version of the article.  In Academic Search Complete, only ‘selected article text’ (due to author exclusions) is available and only in HTML format (without the photographs, etc. from the printed article).

Users with journal alerts running in the Scientific American Archive Online will need to re-create the alerts in the Academic Search Complete database if they wish to retain these alerts.  Instructions for Setting Up a Journal Alert  is available from EBSCOhost Help.  Unfortunately, EBSCOhost does not have a mechanism by which we can notify UC journal alert users of the SAAO discontinuation.

Once again, the descision was made when UC Libraries decided not to license Scientific American on the Nature.com platform.  Economic factors made this decision a necessity.

More detail is provided on CDL’s Challenges to Licensing Web site: http://www.cdlib.org/services/collections/current/challenges.html