Dear Lesley and other lis-e-journals members-

Our apologies for the problems you have experienced with 2002 access to Sage
journals.  We have loaded the new subscription file this morning and your
access, together with that of other institutions, is now being updated.

At present the CatchWord and Ingenta subscription activation systems work
slightly differently.  Access control on Ingenta depends upon the publisher
sending a subscription file to us, which we use to match against library
subscription requests and set up access.  There is a dependency here on
receiving the publisher’s subscription data. If that file is received late
and /or is deficient in terms of the data included it complicates things
somewhat. You have been the victim of just such a complication with Sage. We
are working with Sage to get more data, earlier, so that these problems can
be resolved.

Access control on Catchword is different. When a library requests access to
a journal the request is passed to the publisher for validation.  Publishers
can also opt to switch on access at the time of request and validate later,
thus giving immediate access to the library while the checking is completed.
Most of the publishers hosted on CatchWord have also agreed to grace periods
at the start of new subscription years, so that access is not cut off.

However while this process works well for publishers whose journal
subscriptions run on a calendar year basis, it works less well for those
publishers whose subscriptions are based on volume ranges rather than dates.
MIT’s subscriptions are set up on a volume basis at the publisher’s request,
and that is the origin of the problem that several libraries have
experienced.  We are working to resolve this problem.

While we continue to address these issues, if you should experience any
further problems please contact our help desk directly on [log in to unmask]
or [log in to unmask] in order to alert us as early as possible so that
we can fix them.

Looking forward, we will be approaching all the Ingenta publishers to
provide a similar gracing period to that already offered by CatchWord hosted
publishers at the start of a new subscription period.  Secondly it is our
intention to merge the Ingenta and CatchWord access control systems so that
the subscription set up becomes simpler for both publishers and libraries.

Finally, we had a period of approximately 2 hours yesterday when one of the
CatchWord servers failed; this is the cause of the error messages reported
on this list.  The server in question has been fixed, and we apologise for
the break in service.

If you have any further questions about our plans please do not hesitate to
contact me or Chris Beckett Vice President for Library Services at Ingenta,
and we will be a happy to provide you with an up to date overview of our
future plans.

For specific access problems please contact [log in to unmask]

Best wishes,

Kirsty Meddings
Product Manager Library Services
Ingenta plc, incorporating CatchWord
Tel: +44 (0)1865 799038
www.ingenta.com
www.catchword.com