I blogged about this as well. For me, the inclusion of Author Solutions imprints is just the beginning of the problems with this new service.
I think what happened was that W&A, struggling to remain relevant in a world where self-publishing is commanding increasing presence and power, decided to jump on the bandwagon with a poorly-designed service produced at minimal cost which they also wanted to monetize by getting a fee for "leads." The whole thing is just so badly designed--for instance, the questionnaires that authors fill out in order to get the service provider comparisons doesn't include a question about how much they want to spend--and cheaply produced--the little writeups on each company are swiped from the companies' own websites, for example, and there aren't even links to the websites--that it's just embarrassing.
I think you could make a reasonable argument for including Author Solutions imprints--as long as the writeups provided by W&A were
real writeups, not company PR, and explicitly noted the existence of problems and warnings. But you can't make any kind of reasonable argument to excuse the other problems.
- Victoria