Lesley,
I can, I think, provide you with one additional check for expiration within
the set of publishers working with Stanford's HighWire. HighWire works with
a good number of publishers (about 150), who together produce over 900
journals. I realize for most libraries that is a drop in the bucket.
I'll repeat here some things I know that Lesley knows well:
As you note below, HighWire provides an alerting service that library
subscription administrators can sign up for to tell them (usually in
advance) of the cut-off of access. Each year (about the same time I remind
publishers about gracing!), I email librarians on the HighWire notification
list about this service. All these services are linked to from the "For
Institutions" tab of the HighWire home page, or directly here:
http://highwire.stanford.edu/institutions/
The subscription alerting service, here,
http://highwire.stanford.edu/cgi/alertsSignup/expiredsub
requires that a subscription administrator create a HighWire-wide identity,
and connect up their various subscriptions; so there is some one-time
startup effort. That is described here:
http://highwire.stanford.edu/institutions/subadmin/begin.dtl
Our customer service staff (available via the Contact Us button) will help
librarians through this one-time effort when questions arise.
The one additional check I can suggest is to run the "Subscriptions I
Administer" report (also available from the For Institutions tab), which
will display expiration dates for all the titles you administer, where we
have received those dates from the publisher (some publishers do not send
us expiration dates, and in those cases we provide access as long as an
institution is in the list the publisher sends; so for these HighWire can't
provide an explicit expiration date). To run that report, once you have
done the one-time setup:
Sign in to your HighWire account on the home page at
http://highwire.stanford.edu
Click on the For Institutions tab
Follow the 'Subscriptions I Administer' link in the center column to
go to http://highwire.stanford.edu/cgi/instadmininfo
This report works reasonably well for institutions who centralize
administration to just a few staff (who each run their respective report).
But less well when subscription administration is widely dispersed in an
institution.
Alerting services can be a help, as you suggest (at least you know about
the problem before your patrons do). But since the volume of problems
seems not to be greatly reduced each year (is it?), it would also be
helpful for the whole industry (libraries, agents, publishers, online
platforms) to look at where the renewal-ball gets dropped, delayed, or
mis-laid. There are some industry efforts to address this, one of which
was posted to this list last Friday 20 Jan, "Journal Supply Chain
Efficiency Improvement Pilot project gets underway".
John
--On Wednesday, January 25, 2006 4:42 PM +0000 Lesley Crawshaw
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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
>
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Lesley Crawshaw, Faculty Information Consultant
> Learning and Information Services
> University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, AL10 9AB
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> email: [log in to unmask]
> phone: 01707 284662 fax: 01707 284666
> list owner: [log in to unmask]
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
-------------------
John Sack, Director
HighWire Press, Stanford University
Phone: 650-723-0192; fax: 650-725-9335
http://highwire.stanford.edu/~sack
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