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Early Reaction from Info Community to Clarivate Announcement

Early Reaction from Info Community to Clarivate Announcement

May 2021

Tweets from across the Information Community

Twitter caught fire with community reaction to the Clarivate announcement of its acquisition news:

And you thought the information industry couldn’t consolidate any further?

— Todd Carpenter (@TAC_NISO) May 17, 2021

From Karin Wulf, professor of history at William & Mary and a publisher in her own right:

For scholars of #VastEarlyAmerica, ProQuest means databases...EEBO, Colonial State Papers, American Periodicals and lots lots more... it's good to understand the businesses that hold these materials. https://t.co/7znekvnwKI

— Dr. Karin Wulf (@kawulf) May 17, 2021

To which another academic responded with:

It also means all of our dissertations, which we "published" years ago with UMI and which got sold to ProQuest without our permission or any subsequent payment of royalties

— The Bills make Dr. Jennifer Sessions want to shout (@Laprofmme) May 17, 2021

Roger Schonfeld, director of Ithaka S+R's Libraries, Scholarly Communication, and Museums program, live tweeted the shareholders call:

I'm sitting in on the conference call discussing the Clarivate acquisition of ProQuest. CEOs of both companies as well as several others are participating. I will tweet any notable items threaded to this tweet.

— Roger C. Schonfeld (@rschon) May 17, 2021

Now questions. Q Barclay's: Help us appreciate the complementary nature of your product offerings. How does that create revenue synergies? Mukhtar Ahmed, head of Clarivate Science biz: We can serve the entire research value chain, early stage and K12 setting, thru postgrad.

— Roger C. Schonfeld (@rschon) May 17, 2021

Our content business makes up 62% of revenue. Leading aggregator. All formats. Software solutions business is 34% of revenue. Innovative workflow solutions. Academia is the biggest customer. We have all fifty of the top 50 universities in the world as customers.

— Roger C. Schonfeld (@rschon) May 17, 2021

Q B Reilly Securities: Give us more of a sense of the customer overlap. Cross selling opportunity? A: We can touch every student in K through doctoral degrees everywhere. There is no product overlap.

— Roger C. Schonfeld (@rschon) May 17, 2021

Ahmed: PQ: 1. Alma represents info mgmt & workflow. Distribution infrastructure for right info to right user. 2. Search/research/discovery - Esploro, Pivot. 3. Learning journey, knowledge acquisition. Clarivate: Data, analytics, expertise also. Deeper into core markets.

— Roger C. Schonfeld (@rschon) May 17, 2021

From Aaron Tay, librarian at Singapore Management University, came this response

I think Clarivate+Proquest is really going to be a powerhouse. Besides Proquest services it also owns Exlibris which itself has acquired a lot of companies including III. Elsevier has competition I think... https://t.co/gFOei8mj4n

— Aaron Tay (@aarontay) May 17, 2021

From Curtis Brundy, Associate University Librarian at Iowa State University:

I see little to cheer with this. I've found Clarivate a challenge to negotiate with. Ex Libris Alma, the #Monopoly ILS, is also getting gobbled up here. Not a great start to the week. https://t.co/aJz3X8NmdT

— Curtis Brundy (@curtisbrundy) May 17, 2021

Domination continues with all California libraries having decided to move to #Monopoly Alma https://t.co/59z6yEhJgv

— Curtis Brundy (@curtisbrundy) May 17, 2021

From Scott Walter, Dean of the University Library at San Diego State:

There will be other news today, but there will also be many reflections on how the information singularity was allowed to form and gain sentience (along w/significant profit potential for its shareholders) while we all watched https://t.co/HCmdbBtEwR

— Scott Walter (@slwalter123) May 17, 2021

Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC may have summed it up with his tweet:

Workflow is the new content ... https://t.co/qMdOWnPYkq

— lorcan dempsey (@lorcanD) May 17, 2021