Database Alert: Blackwell Synergy Shutting Down and Merging with Wiley InterScience

Library Users, please be aware that Blackwell Synergy, the home of over 1 million articles from over 850 journals, will cease to exist within the week. However, all is not lost. As of June 30th 2008, all journal content on Blackwell Synergy merges into Wiley InterScience, which is another of our publisher aggregate databases.

Already, access to some components of the Blackwell Synergy product have become unreliable or unavailable. (I can testify to this as the keeper of the library usage statistics!) Officially, it is over the weekend of June 28th and 29th, 2008 that there will be a period when both Blackwell Synergy and Wiley InterScience will be unavailable while the company "transitions and re-indexes data." Then, after July 1, 2008, Blackwell Synergy will no longer be available online, but the content therein should be available via Wiley InterScience, and any existing Blackwell links are supposed to relay to Wiley.


Still, be warned, the transition--starting now--may not be as smooth as the publisher hopes.

Putting a positive spin on this upheaval, the merger will make some 3 million journal articles in over 1400 journals available on a single site. Blackwell journal content will be searchable on Wiley InterScience, and listed under appropriately enhanced subject categories. Wiley claims that "this is a first step in the development of a next generation online publishing platform, arriving early 2009, which will deliver Wiley-Blackwell journals, online books, reference works, databases, protocols and other electronic resources through one integrated service."

More info and an FAQ are available at http://0-interscience.wiley.com.library.law.suffolk.edu/transition

For those who despair over all the mergers and changes in the world of publishing, journals, and databases, my best advice is to get used to it! Merger mania and rapidly changing delivery platforms are now the norm.

Here at the Sawyer Library, we will do our very best to stay on top of these changes and keep our library users informed about any change that will impact them and their research practices.