My organization has nine laboratories dotted around the country, served
by a single library service with staff at each site. We were delighted
to see the new licence which Blackwell Scientific adopted at the
beginning of 2002, as it dropped any mention of geographical locations
and talked instead about providing access to the subscribing
organization. It has long been a concern for us that a university
buying a single subscription can provide electronic access to thousands
of students and staff, yet most publisheers force us to restrict access
to the staff at one laboratory (in some cases only a handful of people)
for the same subscription price. If we can provide access across the
whole organization there are still less than 500 scientific staff
benefiting.
Unfortunately, Blackwell have recently told us that as far as they are
concerned, we are nine separate organizations, and that we can no longer
provide access across all sites. My understanding was that the
Blackwell licence was based on the NESLI licence, and that the NESLI
licence attempted to address this very problem. Has anybody else had
this experience?
Ian
=====================================================
Ian McCulloch
Electronic Resources Librarian
Centre for Ecology and Hydrology
CEH Windermere
Cumbria
LA22 0LP
UK http://www.ceh.ac.uk
Tel. 015394 87716
Fax 015394 46914
|