Lesley,

Answers interspersed below.  I hope this makes it through the listserv (my
first try didn't, hence this resend).


--On Thursday, January 26, 2006 3:23 PM +0000 Lesley Crawshaw
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi John,
>
> Your email prompted me to go and have a quick look at the subscriptions I
> administer function (I do use this and luckily the administration is
> centralised here at the University of Hertfordshire).
>
> One thing that has come out of looking at the list is that there are a
> couple of publishers who are looking ahead and have already applied a 3
> month gracing period to our 2006 subscriptions i.e. PNAS and JAMA, which I
> think is good practice that all Highwire publisher should think of
> adopting. It surely makes administrative sense to put the gracing in as
> each subscription is renewed, otherwise don't the publishers who haven't
> done so, have to repeat the job again in December unnecessarily?

Very interesting point.  I wasn't aware of this practice and will make more
publishers aware of it.

>
> Another thing that is clear is that even on Highwire different publishers
> are adopting different gracing periods. The following only reflect titles
> of ours that are still on a gracing period (and where there is an expiry
> date displaying) e.g. The American Physiological Society and MIT Press
> have a 2 month gracing period, whereas ASPEN and Blackwell only have a 1
> month gracing period.

HighWire-hosted publishers are free to adopt different gracing periods (we
note that the subscription agents recommend two months).  We see 30, 45, 60
and 90 days (and in addition, all the others you can permute: 30 Jan, 1
Feb, 28 Feb, 1 March, etc.).

Some publishers have their fulfillment vendors apply the grace periods,
some grace the online a longer period than the print.  (The HighWire
function that allows publishers to grace, only affects online access, as
you can imagine.)

>
> As you say some publishers do not provide expiry dates and this is
> unfortunate especially as we have "big deals" with both OUP and SAGE.
> These are also publishers where we have never rec'd expiration notices
> even though there have occasionally been problems with our "real"
> subscriptions with these publishers. So I am slightly at a loss as to
> whether I can use the Highwire alerting system with these titles on
> Highwire?

I believe the philosophy behind not sending HighWire the expiration details
is this: the less data transmitted and duplicated between systems, the less
can go wrong.   Our system allows publishers this choice.

Yes, you can use the alerting system with these titles.  However, the
system cannot alert you *in advance* of a problem for these titles, since
we don't know the information in advance.  As you know, you can ask the
HighWire system to tell you some number of days/weeks in advance of a
problem; we can only do this where we have explicit expiration dates.  For
the others, we alert you when your access actually changes.

>
> Another comment is that we appear to be accumulating multiple subscriber
> numbers for many of our OUP titles - I don't have time to look at them
> all, but we now have 4 subscriber numbers for the British Journal of
> Criminology all of which appear to be active. This multiplication of
> subscriber numbers makes looking through the listing much more time
> consuming that it should be. Presumably some of this is being caused by
> the fact that some of these are our "real" subscriptions, but that they
> also come as part of a "big deal" which maybe get given new subscriber
> numbers year on year?

The electronic world is more "flexible" and thus complicated.  Publishers
and libraries have worked out so many ways of buying and selling
(consortia, big deals, multiple products for one journal, multiple
subscriptions for one journal) that what you (and certainly your patrons)
see as a single title is actually a number of different products.  Here are
some examples that come right to mind:

- you have two subscriptions to a journal, which are graced, but you cancel
one and renew one; both will show in your list.
- you cancel a subscription, but gain perpetual access to your subscribed
portion; that will show in your list.
- your main library and your hospital library both have subscriptions and
both activate online access; both will show in your list
- you subscribe to a journal's "current" content AND to its
separately-subscribed "back archive" (e.g., the content from 1920, volume
1, to 1995); these two "products" will show in your list.

And then there are the consortial deals!

In your particular case. for Br. J. Crimonology, and for other OUP and SAGE
titles, what appears to be going on is perpetual access models that OUP and
SAGE use to guarantee you access to the content published during your
subscription(s) year(s) is one subscription/entry, and there is another
entry for your current content subscription (which provides access to
current content back to some fixed date in the past).  Maybe there is some
way to simplify this or at least name it so that you can tell what is going
on.

Fortunately, the good news for patrons is that they don't see this
complexity.  The bad news is that all the rest of us in the "supply chain"
(a "chain-gang" if ever there was one! :) see it all.   I am hopeful that
the projects to get the supply chain organized around the concept of an
institution will gradually whittle away at -- or at least better organize!
-- this complexity.  And, when part of the chain breaks, I am hopeful we
will be able to follow the links quickly and accurately to make the repair.


>
>
> Cheers
> Lesley