EBSCOhost Connect was announced in the spring of 2006 as near as I can recall. (I can’t find the press release about it on the EBSCO website. As close as I can come to a date is from an announcement at the Oregon School Library Information System.) After three years, I’ve finally seen an EBSCOhost Connect in Google web search results. This screencast and accompanying transcript (below) show what I’ve found.

Screencast Video

Video Transcript with Links

EBSCOhost Connection is designed to bridge the gap between a search of Google and other search engines and the valuable content of EBSCOhost that is available to you, courtesy of your library. EBSCOhost Connection is intended to promote and expedite access to this quality content by infusing brief citation-only records from EBSCOhost databases within result lists generated by these search engines. As such, you can click on the EBSCOhost record in these result lists, and be appropriately directed to the database pages within your library’s EBSCOhost resources.

This sounds like a good idea, but until I saw a post last week from Aaron Schmidt on his Walking Paper blog, I hadn’t really seen any of these EBSCOhost Connect records in Google web search results. Aaron found that a Google search for “triumph triple connection” will show an EBSCOhost Connect record. In my testing, I found it to be in either the sixth or seventh position on the first screen of results. Your experiences will, of course, vary by your geographic location and past search history, but — in any case — I made this screencast to show you what it looks like from both inside and outside an IP address range recognized as subscribing to EBSCOhost.

In the simplest case, your machine is using an IP address configured as part of an EBSCOhost subscription. Starting at Google, we’ll do a search for “triumph triple connection” and scroll down to see the EBSCOhost Connect record. Clicking on it gives this brief citation display with a note at the top to access the complete article on EBSCOhost courtesy of my place of work. Selecting that link indeed takes you to the full record display with all of the EBSCOhost functionality.

It is a little more complicated if your machine is using an IP address that is not recognized by EBSCOhost as coming from a subscribing institution. To demonstrate this, we’ll start again at Google and search for “triumph triple connection”. This time when we select the search result from Google we get a page with with this heading where the link directly into EBSCOhost used to be. We need to come over to the left sidebar to find our institution — either by institution name, by ZIP code, or by using a narrowing down browse process. I’ll search for “Ohio” as part of the institution name. And indeed my place of work shows up as a choice.

It is at this point that things start to go wrong. As Aaron noted in his post, he couldn’t get past this screen. I had the benefit of looking at the EBSCOadmin configuration for my place of work, and unfortunately that still didn’t help. What we get is this rather unhelpful, generic EBSCOhost login. Even though our consortial configuration in EBSCOadmin is set to use our EZproxy server to authenticate users, we still get this generic login prompt. The EBSCO Support knowledge bank entry for How do I set up EBSCOhost Connection? describes an authentication setting: – “From the drop-down list, select the method of authentication you want to use: User ID/Password, CPID, or Patron ID.” The problem is that I don’t want to use any of those. I want to send our users through our proxy server and EBSCOhost Connect seems to be ignoring the proxy profile setting, and that option isn’t even listed in the documentation.

This might be worth a call to EBSCO to clear up, but frankly if it has taken this long for me to stumble across one of these Google search hits I’m not sure how often our users actually get this far. I’ll probably put that call on the “if-I-have-nothing-else-better-to-do” list, and if I ever get to it or this somehow magically gets resolved, I’ll post an update on this blog post. Thanks for listening.

A controversy is starting to pick up in the business librarian community — primarily in the U.K. it would seem — regarding the licensing demands of Harvard Business Press (HBP) for the inclusion of Harvard Business Review articles in EBSCOhost. HBP content in EBSCOhost carries a publisher-specific rider that says use is limited to “private individual use” and explicitly bars the practice of putting “deep links” of articles from EBSCOhost (so called “persistent links“) into learning management systems. In my words, HBP is attempting to limit access to its content in EBSCOhost to those who find it through the serendipity of searching. And now HBP is going after schools that are using persistent linking, and this raises all sorts of troubling questions.

The only visible sign of the publisher-specific rider (that I can find) is text appended to the end of each article from Harvard Business Review in EBSCOhost (copied from a post by Paul Pival):

Harvard Business Review Notice of Use Restrictions, May 2009 Harvard Business Review and Harvard Business Publishing Newsletter content on EBSCOhost is licensed for the private individual use of authorized EBSCOhost users. It is not intended for use as assigned course material in academic institutions nor as corporate learning or training materials in businesses. Academic licensees may not use this content in electronic reserves, electronic course packs, persistent linking from syllabi or by any other means of incorporating the content into course resources. Business licensees may not host this content on learning management systems or use persistent linking or other means to incorporate the content into learning management systems. Harvard Business Publishing will be pleased to grant permission to make this content available through such means. For rates and permission, contact permissions@harvardbusiness.org.

It was Pival’s next statement, though, in that same post where he relays a conversation with a colleague at a different institution that raised my eyebrows (emphasis added):

He also mentioned that HBSP [Harvard Business School Publishing] had leaned on his school and when they decided not to pay, EBSCO turned off the ability for them to create PURLs for that publisher.

Huh? How does HBP know that deep links are being used in that way?

EBSCO Information Services Website Privacy Policy

Graphical representation of the HTTP Referer Header

So now that we know how it is probably happening, we can ask “Is there anything in EBSCO’s terms-of-use that permits them to share usage information with content suppliers?” The answer would seem to be “probably yes”. The place to look is the EBSCO privacy policy. Here is an extract from the policy dated December 26, 2006 (the current version as of the time of writing). The HTTP Referer header seems to fall in the category of “Non-Personal Identifying Information:

B. Collection of Non-Personal Identifying Information
We collect and use non-personal identifying information, including IP addresses and web server log files to track trends, administer the website, track user movement, and gather demographic information. We use this non-personal identifying information in the aggregate. We do not combine these types of non-personal identifying information with personal identifying information [a term defined earlier in the privacy policy; e.g. user's name, address]. We may also share aggregated demographic information with our business partners, sponsors, advertisers, and companies that control, are controlled by, or are under common control with EBSCO Information Services.

The HTTP referer information comes from the web server log files (it is a byproduct of running a web server), and HBP is probably considered a “business partner”, so HBP can make a request of EBSCO like “Give me all of the HTTP referer addresses that link to HBP articles, and the number of times each referer addresses is used.” It would be pretty simple then for HBP to determine which institutions were deep linking directly to Harvard Business Review articles.

EBSCO Publishing License Agreement (Terms of Use)

C. Licensee and Authorized Users agree to abide by the Copyright Act of 1976 as well as any contractual restrictions, copyright restrictions, or other restrictions provided by publishers and specified in the Databases. [...] Publishers may impose their own conditions of use applicable only to their content. Such conditions of use shall be displayed on the computer screen displays associated with such content. The Licensee shall take all reasonable precautions to limit the usage of the Databases(s) to those specifically authorized by this Agreement.

And the repercussions of violating the Terms of Use? They are spelled out in the “Termination” section:

A. In the event of a breach of any of its obligations under this Agreement, Licensee shall have the right to remedy the breach within thirty (30) days upon receipt of written notice from EBSCO. Within the period of such notice Licensee shall make every reasonable effort and document said effort to remedy such a breach and shall institute any reasonable procedures to prevent future occurrences of such breaches. If the Licensee fails to remedy such a breach within the period of thirty (30) days, EBSCO may (at its option) terminate this Agreement upon written notice to the Licensee.

B. If EBSCO becomes aware of a material breach of Licensee’s obligations under this Agreement or a breach by Licensee or Authorized Users of the rights of EBSCO or its licensors or an infringement on the rights of EBSCO or its licensors, then EBSCO will notify the Licensee immediately in writing and shall have the right to temporarily suspend the Licensee’s access to the Product(s). Licensee shall be given the opportunity to remedy the breach or infringement within thirty (30) days following receipt of written notice from EBSCO. Once the breach or infringement has been remedied or the offending activity halted, EBSCO shall reinstate access to the Databases. If the Licensee does not satisfactorily remedy the offending activity within thirty (30) days, EBSCO may terminate this Agreement upon written notice to the Licensee.

I haven’t seen mention of EBSCO going so far as to terminate access to all or part of EBSCOhost, but there are indications that EBSCO is disabling the deep links to HBP content. There are reports of HBP asking libraries to pay an additional fee to EBSCO for the ability to have deep linking for HBP content. By one account, a UK university might have to pay an additional £15,000 (about $25,000 at current conversion rates) to “create persistent links for use in teaching.”

Do We Have to Take It?

Screen capture of a record for a Harvard Business Review article on EBSCOhost

And what is EBSCO’s role in this? Isn’t a library’s contract with EBSCO, not Harvard Business Publishing? Is EBSCO earning more revenue from this HBP license requirement to enable deep linking to article content? If so, isn’t that just an incentive for EBSCO to do the same with other high-profile publishers?

I don’t have answers to these last questions, but I do get a very uncomfortable feeling.

Update

August 28, 2009: An opinion piece in Library Journal from Chris Flegg, Bodleian Business Librarian of the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford (UK) goes into more depth, and includes Oxford’s response — not to pay and have deep linking turned off.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.caul.edu.au/datasets/hbr2008course-use.pdf to http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20091003235023/http://www.caul.edu.au/datasets/hbr2008course-use.pdf on February 11th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. Yes, they know they misspelled the word “referrer”
2. This is probably the kind of business intelligence that EBSCO already collected about how its service is used. I doubt that the recording and processing of HTTP referer headers is something specific to HBP content.
3. In its “Academic Permission Form“, HBP says the cost of permission to reproduce and distribute articles is $3 per copy. In addition, high-quality hard copies can be purchased from HBP for $3.42 each in quantities of 10 or more.