The Conquest of ProQuest and Knowledge Unlatched: How recent mergers are bad for research and the public

"We wish we could say that these types of corporate consolidations were unusual for the information services industry, but we can’t. Clarivate-ProQuest and Wiley-KU follow in a long line of library vendors that have merged or consolidated, particularly in recent years. Librarians and researchers have watched dozens of academic journal publishers dwindle to a small, powerful publishing oligopoly that controls the research market. We’ve also seen our library services management products—including catalogs, digital lending services, and collection development management tools—get consumed, piece-by-piece, by ProQuest, the same library platform monopolist that Clarivate purchased in a $5.3 billion deal. Library workers are well aware of the shrinking options that librarians have under the growing control of just a few companies.... This means that companies like RELX and Clarivate aren’t traditional library services providers and information publishers—they’re data analytics companies. In the research space, these analytics companies are particularly insidious...."