Third-party arrangement to be dropped by RCN Publishing

RCN Publishing is ending a long-standing arrangement to provide access to current full text journal content via third-party database and aggregation services.

The organisation says the decision to end these arrangements is in keeping with its policy to serve users directly, providing access via its own journals platform, Literatum, from Atypon.

RCN's arrangement with OVID ended earlier in 2014 and access via EBSCO’s database services finishes in November 2014. Agreements with both Cengage Learning and ProQuest ended in 2012 and 2013 respectively. Current full text content in RCN Publishing journals will only be available via RCN Publishing’s own journal site. Users will, however, still able to access back file content using their existing database subscriptions.

Tony O’Rourke, commercial director, said: 'We want to give our users the best possible experience, regardless of where or how they may be working with our content; in the library, the classroom, the hospital ward or using our mobile enabled platform in the community.  Our journal service provides the functionality required to support learning and further research such as HTML and PDF versions of articles, article level DOIs, reference linking and so much more.

'Library administrators can access COUNTER-compliant usage statistics and authenticate usage in their organisations using Shibboleth and other open authentication systems.  Even though we have ended our full text arrangements with these organisations, we are committed to ensuring that our content remains as discoverable as possible – and we will continue to work with any database, abstracting and indexing services which support learning, practice and research in nursing, healthcare and beyond.'

O’Rourke added: 'In a constantly changing environment, RCN Publishing recognises the need to be able to respond quickly to new technologies and new ways of accessing content. As aggregation agreements with EBSCO and Ovid were coming to an end, we took the opportunity to focus our energy on providing our own service.'  

Over the coming months RCN Publishing will be announcing several initiatives, currently in development, to further enhance its users’ experience.