Collections News

CSU is currently analyzing the Library’s Springer journals package. Changes to our Springer subscriptions may be necessary for us to meet the collections budget cut we’ve received. As part our work to understand which Springer journals are most essential at the U of A, we’re asking researchers for their direct input.

ACTION

FE librarians, would you please raise awareness of this request within your areas? We’re asking for input by 30 June. Below is text you can use for awareness-raising, along with a link to the form we’re using to compile responses. Thank you!

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The U of A Library’s Collection Strategies Unit seeks input from all corners of the University about which journals published by Springer are most essential for researchers. Researchers in all disciplines are encouraged to visit this brief form to provide a response: link to form. The deadline to contribute is 30 June 2025. Thanks very much in advance.

BACKGROUND

Due to ongoing reductions to the Library’s collection budget, the Collection Strategies Unit is closely assessing our large journal subscription packages. One publisher we’re focusing on this year is Springer. We currently subscribe to a package containing more than two thousand scholarly journals from this publisher. When compared to similar journal subscriptions, the Springer package contains a high proportion of journals that are not used by U of A faculty and students.

Our assessment focuses on identifying which Springer journals are most essential for U of A researchers. We highly value input directly from researchers. To this end, we are inviting all University of Alberta researchers to use the above form to indicate the Springer journals that they consider most important for their research and teaching.

With questions, please contact csu@ualberta.ca.

Tl;dr:

• ERIC continues to operate, but is indexing fewer journals
• The contents of ERIC are reported to be stable with no plans to delete records
• If/when potential alternatives to ERIC emerge, we would assess these in collaboration with TAL (because ERIC is in the TAL Core set of subscriptions)

As we’re all aware, lately there’s been a lot of worrying news about widespread defunding and dismantling of American research and knowledge infrastructures. In CSU, we’re working to stay informed and to understand the impacts on our collection.

One resource that’s been under a cloud of uncertainty is core Education database ERIC. The US Department of Education’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, runs and maintains ERIC.

In late April 2025, it was announced that ERIC would continue to operate, albeit on a smaller scale. The acting head of the Institute of Education Sciences, Matthew Soldner, has stated that “no content has been removed or deleted from ERIC,” and that the database’s “preservation policy is unchanged: we will not remove an article in ERIC unless it is retracted by the publisher.”

At this time, we do not have a complete sense of how ERIC’s reduced capacity will affect its coverage. There’s a collaborative list of journals no longer covered by ERIC, but this is an incomplete list, based on reports from individual journal editors. It has been reported elsewhere that ERIC’s indexing will shrink from 1,200 to 700 titles.

Vendors such as EBSCO are working on ERIC alternatives, but nothing has been announced or offered yet. Because ERIC is so widely important, it’s part of The Alberta Library’s TAL Core set of subscriptions. We’ll work with the TAL team as they monitor the situation surrounding ERIC and consider options for additional coverage of education research.

WRDS ( Wharton Research Data Services) is an aggregator platform that hosts Business data collections from a number of different providers. Until recently, there were some LSEG collections still listed in WRDS as belonging to Thomson Reuters, the previous provider.

In addition, there are a couple of LSEG collections subscribed by the Alberta School of Business that are licensed for all UofA students, faculty and staff, but for which we’d never created database assets.

Accordingly, we’ve made changes to some titles on the A-Z list to match what is displayed on the WRDS platform, and also created two new assets:

• Thomson Reuters Insiders Data is now: LSEG Insiders Data 
• Thomson Reuters Institutional 13F Holdings is now: LSEG Institutional (13F) Holdings
• IBES is now: LSEG IBES Academic
• New: LSEG Mergent FISD
• New: LSEG Worldscope
  

All collections on the WRDS platform are accessed through the same link. After logging in with their CCID, users receive an email with a link for a one-day pass to WRDS, enabling them to access all of the collections subscribed by both the Library and the Alberta School of Business. 

Effective April 30/25, we have cancelled LSEG Data & Analytics. In order to replace much of the content on this platform, we are now subscribing to a Standard & Poors database: S&P Capital IQ Pro. This product replaces the Workspace for Students module from LSEG.

We are also subscribing to S&P’s AfterMarket Research (AMR) database, which is hosted on the S&P Capital IQ Pro platform. This product replaces the AMR module from LSEG.

We will not be replacing the complete Datastream collection on the LSEG platform, but the four individual Datastream collections on the WRDS platform will continue to be available, as those are funded by the Alberta School of Business.

On May 20th at 1:00pm, S&P is providing a live online training session for Library staff. This session will cover both S&P Capital IQ Pro and AfterMarket Research. If you would like to attend please register via Libcal here. A recording of the session will be sent later to those who have registered.

Over the next few months, Elsevier is offering a series of free webinars on UofA-subscribed databases:

Compendex (Engineering Village)
Embase
Knovel
Reaxys
Scopus