Here are the responses that I received to my enquiry to the list recently.
I have been in contact with our suppliers and they are checking the 27 price
rises of over 30% (of journals costing over £200pa).  Apparently
Cardiovascular and Interventional Radiology, which went up 300% was due to
no special reason.  "Springer Verlag New York decided to increase the rate
without any
reason, there are no extra pages or issues just an general price increase."
So I want to cancel.  

I think that publishers should not be able to increase the prices by such an
amount without informing subscribers before we renew our journals.  Their
decisions about price changes should be made earlier in the year so that we
have more reliable data on which to make our decisions.

I would also like to have access to more titles on an electronic only basis,
at a cheaper rate than print.  After all, the publishers do not pay authors,
and they would not have print, storage or postage costs.  Many of the titles
do have an electronic version already.  

Some have become more difficult to obtain.  for instance, I am having a
terrible job getting access for my cardiothoracic surgeons to the Annals of
Thoracic Surgery - their major resource.  It is available electronically,
and we used to have it.  Free online with a print subscription has now
ended.  I, and the surgeons, are very frustrated about this.


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We use Rowecom, and yes I did notice an increase in subscription costs from
the renewal figures from last year (I've only been in post a year, so I
don't know if this was more than usual or not). they weren't as high as
yours (on average it was about 10-20%, but this did vary greatly - some
hadn't increased at all) but we are a public health/health promotion library
and quite a few of our titles are fairly cheap anyway, so perhaps there's
more of an increase for medical/clinical journals.
 I did ask Rowecom to mention if there was more than 10% increase before
they invoiced us (as they had warned us that the new prices would obviously
be increased, but not by how much), and if the total figure would be higher
than £5,000 - neither of which they did (even though they were!). most
titles we requested weren't available online at all, or had restrictive
licences - again perhaps because of the subject matter. Those that were free
with print subs tended to be those free on the Internet to anyone anyway.
 we still went ahead and purchased as we'd expected even with the increases,
as we could cope with the increase, and had changed a number of the journals
(including not renewing some expensive ones), so the overall total was about
the same as last year anyway.
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Our EBSCO final bill was actually 17.38 less than the renewal notice with
every price being different from the estimate in a swings and roundabouts
fashion, the biggest difference being in our favour, a journal quoted at
404.39 costing 152.32 less when it came to payment. Our most expensive
journal was quoted at 1622.65 and came in at 1693.73. This is the first year
we have used EBSCO, and so far, I have been glad we made the switch, but it
is early days yet.
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As Acquisitions librarian for the xx library, I only have anecdotal evidence
about price rises 
for this year and take your word for it that they will be worse than 
usual.  We have already however been forced to take drastic action 
because of overspending last session combined with pressure to pay 
for online access for titles such as Nature.  Because of this 
cancellations have been made for 2002 to reduce our journal spending 
(not the same as the journals budget which increases about 1% a year) 
by 25%.
Obviously the impact of this hasn't yet been felt by our users but I 
dread what their reactions will be when we offer ILL as an 
alternative.  The journals cancelled were chosen on the results of a 
usage survey in which costs per consultation were calculated.
From now on we plan to survey all titles with a very few exceptions 
(BMJ, Lancet etc) throughout the year and report on their use 
annually.

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As a relatively new EBSCO customer I have been equally amazed at some of
the figures they are quoting. One of my titles is being quoted at £500 more
than last year.

I have queried this (& threatened to cancel the offending titles with them
next year) & they are working on a revised figure based on their
consolidation service, since I think most of the OTT increases are North
American titles.

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Margaret Valentine

Trust Librarian
Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Trust
Freeman Hospital Library
Education Centre
Freeman Hospital
High Heaton
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE7 7DN

Tel: (0191) 223 1325 (or internal ext. 31325)
Fax: (0191) 284 3783
Email: [log in to unmask]