Online access to Scientific American will end on May 31, 2010. According to the California Digital Libraries’ Challenges to Licensing from Some Publishers, this move was necessitated by an excessive price increase:
Nature Publishing Group has recently taken over publication of Scientific American from its sister company at the Holtzbrinck group. With this change in management, the cost of UC’s online site license would be more than twice the fee currently charged for systemwide access. It is worth noting that this fee represents a ‘discounted’ offer: the list price quoted to the CDL is well over five times our current cost. The price of an institutional print subscription is also increasing more than seven-fold.
In addition, per CDLINFO News, Nature Publishing Group has decided to pull the Scientific American Archive from EBSCO on May 31, 2010, so we will no longer have online access to archival issues either. Print issues will continue to be available in some campus libraries – check OskiCat for details.