Hi,

Our institution has had a license agreement to access most of the
content on KluwerOnline since 2000.

Quite by accident (isn't that always the way?), when trying to get ready
for the transfer of Kluwer Law International titles from KluwerOnline to
the new publisher's site (but that's another story), I noticed that many
Kluwer journals where the backfiles had previously only gone back a few
years to e.g. 1999 or 2000, seemed to have had additional content added,
in many cases back to 1997 or 1998. It is clear from looking at the
contents pages that this retrospective addition of backfiles is
currently in process because in many cases there are only bits and
pieces of volumes there.

Now, whilst I welcome the addition of more online content, I would have
preferred that I had received some communication from the publisher to
this effect, at least to make us aware that this was happening. However,
my experience over the past few years is that Kluwer has been and is
still seriously lacking in the area of communication of changes etc. to
its customers. To date I have received no information from Kluwer about
this addition of backfiles. What makes it more difficult is that there
is no easy way to be sure that just because the backfiles have been
added that we have rights to access the full text, unlike ScienceDirect
or Synergy there is nothing to indicate to users which titles they have
access to and which they don't. This means that the only way to be sure
that we do have access is to open a full text file for the earliest
issues of each of these journals, thereby adding to our ejournal
statistics!! So far I have had to make over 50 changes to holdings
because of this, and I am still not even halfway through this task.

Another problem with Kluwer titles is that usually one has to go into
each journal page in order to find out information about cessations,
titles changes etc. Although a few changes are listed on the listing of
journals, the  However, this information is patchy e.g. International
Ophthalmology hasn't had any new issues since the end of 2001. The same
is true of Somatic Cell and Molecular Genetics where there have been no
issues since the end of 2001. Both these journals appear to be current
as the journal homepage gives the 2003 subscription information.


Anybody else out there got anything they would like to add, or am I
being unfair to Kluwer?

Cheers
Lesley

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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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