Thank you for posting this information.
As yet, we have not had any communication from Dialog informing us of any
change to the pricing structure for Datastar - the only way we found out
was from messages posted to lis-ukolug.
We will now be contacting Dialog to see what is happening.
It is likely we will cancel our Datastar account ASAP, as we only use it
for alerts now, and we will be transfering many of these over to run from
our silverplatter medline subscription, now that ERL 4 allows this, which
will save quite a lot of money. We will transfer any existing alerts over
to Dialog, which will hopefully cover the monthly minimum fee we normally
pay there, as our usgae is quite low at the moment. The dialog fee, if
they really must have one, would be better if it was an annual minimum
charge, as our usage varies considerably fro month to month, so in many
months we don't use it at all, and then run up large bill inother months.
Jeremy Evans
NIBSC library
>I, like many other (now former) DataStar users wrote to Dialog as
>soon as I received the letter about the new annual fees (received on
>October 9th) and cancelled my DataStar account. However, I did not
>receive any confirmation that my letter had been acted upon. So I
>used a contact form on the Dialog site to find out what had happened.
>It promised a response within 1 business day and I have now received
>an email confirming that my account has been "deactivated".
>
>Nevertheless, they have in the meantime sent me an invoice for SFR 80
>which is the annual fee for my ID. This was introduced for DataStar
>pay-as-you-go customers long before the MAID takeover and, I think,
>even before Knight Ridder. It does not surprise me that the left hand
>does not know what the right hand is doing, but I do object most
>strongly to Dialog attempting to extract SFR 80 in *addition* to the
>new annual fees.
>
>
>-------------------------------
>Karen Blakeman, UKOLUG Chair
>RBA Information Services,
>Tel: 0118 9472256, Fax: 0870 056 8547, Mobile: 0860 785716
>E-Mail: [log in to unmask], http://www.rba.co.uk/
Jeremy Evans
Information Services
Library
NIBSC
Blanche Lane
South Mimms, Potters Bar
Hertfordshire UK EN6 3QG
01707 654753 ext 323/326
FAX: 01707 646845
Email: [log in to unmask]
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|