Hi,
How does one know that one longer has access to an electronic journal,
that what thinks one has a subscription to? My own experience is that
the only service, that provides access to several publishers journals,
where an email alert is provided when a title has expired is Highwire.
One has to do a little bit of extra work to get all ones subscriptions
identified and consolidated on Highwire, but once that is done it is
plain sailing. With other services such as ingenta/ingenta select the
only way of finding this out is to wade through a list of all of ones
subscriptions to try and identify any problems. Of course, during the
process one spots additional problems that weren't expected. Highwire
provides an active means of notification via email, whereas
ingenta/ingenta select provide a more passive and laborious means of
finding out for oneselves. Also, whilst some smaller publishers do
provide alerts when a journal subscription expires, these tend to be in
the minority.
This lack of alerting to subscriptions going down has been highlighted
for us this year, because we find ourselves here at the University of
Hertfordshire in a very unusual position regarding our former Divine
subscriptions (Divine was our major agent), in that because we received
invoices at the end of December 2002 after it became clear that the
parent company of Divine was in major financial difficulties (which is
putting it nicely), we have not yet paid any of our journal
subscriptions for 2003 that we purchased through Divine. All the advice
we received suggested that we should sit on these invoices until the
future of Divine became clear. Of course takeovers take time, and we
find ourselves still patiently waiting. Worse still, we still haven't
been invoiced for a significant number of our Divine subscriptions for
2003.
Many publishers have graced the subscriptions of "former" Divine
subscribers, some for many months, some for as long as it takes, which
has been very welcome. As the takeover of Divine (Europe) and others by
Ebsco has proceeded, some publishers are saying that they will now only
continue to grace Divine subscribers that have paid Divine, which we
would like to do, but can't. Many publishers are using list of Divine
subscribers who are know to have paid Divine, but again we won't be on
that list. So where we can identify that we have lost access to a
subscription we are trying to contact the relevant publisher and explain
our position and try and get our access extended, until payment from
Divine (Europe) begins to pass to the publishers. We have also
pre-empted loss of access to certain publisher's titles by contacting
them in advance. Even after lengthy correspondance with some publishers,
we have been unable to get our access reinstated e.g. American Society
of Microbiology. However, what we are really worried about is how many
of our subscriptions have fallen over without us being aware that there
is a problem, and how many publishers we still have to contact!!!
There is no doubt that 2003 has been a very difficult year for all those
who dealt with Divine, but even in a normal year an advance email
alerting system to warn the subscriber that there was an impending
problem with a particular journal subscription would be very welcome.
Cheers
Lesley
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Lesley Crawshaw, Faculty Information Consultant,
Learning and Information Services,
University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, AL10 9AB UK
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e-mail: [log in to unmask]
phone: 01707 284662 fax: 01707 284666
web: http://www.herts.ac.uk/lis/subjects/natsci/ejournal/
list owner: [log in to unmask]
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