A survey sponsored by scientific publisher Springer about Springer has, unsurprisingly, come out in favour of the Springer eBook service SpringerLink.

Six international universities were questioned as users of the Springerlink eBook program. According to Springer they said the eBook enhanced user access with greater functionality, more categories of information and "provided clear advantages over print publications". Information professionals also told the Attfield Dykstra and Partners, who carried out survey that not physically handling the book for archiving had cost advantages. Is there anything new here yet?

Further ground breaking insights included "back-end efficiencies" from the "lack of storage requirements". No mention of the cost of servers.

The universities involved in the survey were the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; University of Florida; University Library of Turku, Finland; Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) Amsterdam, The Netherlands; University of Muenster, Germany, General and Medical Library; and Victoria University, Australia.

In a statement Olaf Ernst, Vice President eProduct Management said, “This survey is instrumental to Springer in continuing to build our eBook program, and catering to the needs of our subscribers."

He went on to say that “The future is bright for eBooks in the academic realm".