Hi,
From time to time I come across journals where electronic access is
available, but where access is restricted to society members. These can be
journals published on behalf of societies by publishers or societies that
publish their own journals. These are a real pain!
We recently discovered that one of our institutional subscriptions, Journal
for Vascular Ultrasound, was available on IngentaConnect.
As we needed to try and verify what access rights a current institutional
subscription entitled us to, I emailed the publisher, the Society for
Vascular Ultrasound. I had also visited the information on the society's web
site at: http://www.svunet.org/JVU/index.htm and had noted that
institutional subscribers seemed to be excluded from accessing this journal
online. So I was not surprised when I received an extremely curt reply to my
email to the society saying "Institutional subscriptions do not have access
to the online JVU" In fact that was all the email said, there was no
explanation as to why.
I contacted the society by phone this time to ask why this was the case and
was told that access to the electronic journal was a benefit for members. On
looking at the web site more closely there did seem to be many other
benefits of membership than just access to the society's journal, so why the
restriction? Does this society not realise that by refusing access to the
eversion of their journal, that they are potentially undermining the use of
their journal and therefore their institutional subscription base?
Increasingly we find that our staff and students prefer to access journals
electronically and are increasingly reluctant to access print issues.
I have now been advised to contact Steven Haracznak, the executive director
of SVU.
Are there other potential institutional subscribers to this title out there
who would like online access to JVU? Have any institutions taken out
membership of the JVU to get round this problem? Are there other cases where
you have found another society's journal is available electronically, but
then denied access as an institutional subscriber?
If others out there would like to add their name or comments to the email I
am going to send to the SVU I would be glad to hear from you.
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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