Hi,
The whole issue of subscribers numbers changing and then losing to loss of
access to online content is not an infrequent problems as many examples to
this list over a number of years has shown. Terry Bucknell's recent email to
this list suggested that there was a better way by using an International
Standard Identifier for Libraries and Related Organisations (ISIL). Do any
of the publishers or agents on this list think that this would be a better
way forward?
The lack of stability in these numbers and the associated online access is
worrying, because it is hard for us to identify journals we have lost access
to because of changes in the numbers associated with our subscriptions. If
there were more alerting services when subscriptions go down such as the
Highwire alerting service in existance this might help improve things.
I recently found that we had lost all our access to one of our Geological
Society Publishing House Journal on IngentaConnect, the Scottish Journal of
Geology. This was the 2nd time in a month that we had lost access to this
title. Ingenta had kindly fixed our access to this title in December 2004,
but we then found we had lost access to this title again this year in 2005.
It transpired that the loss of access in December 2004 was caused by the
fact that the Geological Society had given this subscription a new "magic"
Number, whereas the title originally been activated on another number. This
problem was then fixed by Ingenta. The loss of access in January 2005
appears to have been caused by the fact that the old number under which this
title had originally been set up suddenly reappeared and became the current
number under which our subscription to this journal was identified. This new
old number hadn't been associated with our account. Again Ingenta was able
to get this fixed for us. It was pure chance that I just happened to be
checking that our access rights for our former IngentaSelect subscriptions
had been properly transferred to the new IngentaConnect service, otherwise
we might never have known.
Just in case others out there haven't spotted this, I also found that the
Journal of the Geological Society now goes back to 1979 on IngentaConnect.
It's a pity that the Geological Society didn't think this important enough
to bring to the attention of its subscribers.
That's all for now folks!
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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