Hi,
Haven't we been here before on many occasions?
The ASA called upon all publishers to grace their electronic journal
subscriptions for at least two months
(http://www.subscription-agents.org/news/egrace.html) several years ago. I
believe that this was a very sensible recommendation and should have been
accepted as the standard by all publishers.
Whilst one hoped that publishers might have adopted this as a standard, we
now find that some publishers have not adopted any gracing period at all,
some apply grace to the print, but not the electronic journal, some have
gone for a month e.g. Blackwell Publishing, some have gone for two months
and some for three months. How are we meant to know which publishers have
adopted which gracing period? Is there somewhere I can go to find out what
each publisher does? This is really important as if a gracing period has
been adopted any underlying problems won't rear their head until the
protection that gracing offers is removed. There is no point checking access
if gracing has been applied as everything will appear as normal.
Yet the problems with loss of access to subscribed content has not gone away
judging from the various alerts of impending withdrawal of access coming
into my in tray at the moment. With most services not providing any alerts
when the access is removed one is left wondering how many other problems are
out there, but have yet to raise their head.
We've identified a few problems with publishers cutting off our access on
the 31/12/05 (totally incomprehensible as who's around to sort these
problems then!!) and managed to sort those, most of which I would like to
point out relate to publishers either not following the processes through
that would avoid the loss of online access, rather than non-payment for the
journals in question. One publisher had employed a temporary person who had
not entered our account as paid in the relevant database, leaving the
publisher to believe we hadn't paid for our subscription for 2006. Another
publisher had the paper subscription as renewed, but hadn't updated the web
site through which the e-access was controlled.
We are now getting some warnings (only from Highwire and some publishers
hosted on Extenza I should point out) about impending loss of access on the
01/02/06. Others we are picking up as our users find they are having
problems. In some cases we have found out that payments were incorrectly
processed by the publisher or haven't been correctly matched up to our
existing account.
In some cases where we lose access we lose access to everything. If we've
gone online only we may suddenly find we have no rights to access the full
text at all.
What we also need apart from a standard gracing period, are better
facilities to alert ejournal administrators (I would add agents as well, but
I don't know whether agents get such alerts from publishers) when there are
problems with subscriptions. Few services provide this, but to me this is an
essential requirement for any service provider/publisher. A lot of effort
has gone into enhancing journal sites with all kinds of fancy stuff for
users, but it sometimes appears that the same effort has not gone into
keeping subscribers aware of when there are impending problems with their
online access.
And then of course there are the changes of publisher, changes of title, and
all the various problems associated with these changes that often happen.
Cheers
Lesley
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Lesley Crawshaw, Faculty Information Consultant
Learning and Information Services
University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, AL10 9AB
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email: [log in to unmask]
phone: 01707 284662 fax: 01707 284666
list owner: [log in to unmask]
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