RE: Print-Only Subscription Trend

["Lesley Crawshaw" <l.a.crawshaw@herts.ac.uk>]

Hi,

Whilst I am sure that some librarians did select print only, I'm 
pretty sure that a significant number are due to former 
print/online subscriptions defaulting back to print only, so if 
no action is taken by the librarian at renewal time to specify to 
the agent which of the new format options is wanted one ends up 
with print by default. From my own experience in the past few 
years I know of several publishers who have found they've had a 
similar problem to the one that you describe. There are always 
some problems with renewals when a publisher changes their 
pricing policy. It may be worth contacting your subscribers to 
see if renewing as print was their original intention.

Takeover titles create additional problems. We have an 
interesting case with our one Duke University subscription, 
Philosophical Review. This was new to DUP this year, however at 
present it is a delayed publication and we haven't yet paid for 
2006. I notice that this title is still not on the Duke Journals 
site so at the moment there is nothing we can do to gain access. 
I presume that even if the backfiles were loaded for this title 
onto Highwire, we would still find ourselves unable to access it 
because we wouldn't be able to have a current print/online or 
online only subscription due to the publication being delayed and 
our subscription being a print only subscription (although we 
have accessed this title through POEISIS - will that still 
remain?). At least we are now aware that this title is published 
by DUP, and that your pricing policy changed from 2006.

We've had many occasions just this year when publishers have 
changed their pricing policy like you and in some cases we were 
not aware of it at the point we do journal renewals. We try our 
best to keep up to date with all the changes that publisher make 
to their subscription options, but it's an impossible task at 
time with so much fluidity in the journal market. It may take a 
while before we are aware of the change and can take steps to 
correct it.  The journal renewals season isn't like it used to 
be. In the print only days the instruction was simple renew or 
cancel. It is getting incredibly hard to keep up to date with all 
the changes going on especially when you could be dealing with 
several hundred publishers all of who are doing their own thing - 
we also have to make sure that license conditions associated with 
choosing the online only route meet our minimum criteria.

We had problems with some of our T&F renewals this year - again 
they changed their pricing policy to allow the possibility of 
online only. We clearly identified to our agent the relevant 
titles and requested they be renewed as online only. When we 
started receiving the invoices we noticed that several had been 
renewed as print/online in error. We've had to chase all the ones 
we spotted, which caused a lot of extra work. Even trying to keep 
online only journals as online only isn't always as easy as it 
should be - I had several Blackwell Publishing titles that had 
been online only for several years, when for some reason they 
reverted back to standard access in 2005 even though they had 
been clearly identified to be renewed as online only. We also 
gave instructions to our agent to renew all our Blackwell 
publishing titles as online only for 2005 and about 10% of the 
titles were renewed by our agent as standard rather than online 
only. If we hadn't had a big deal with Blackwell Publishing this 
would have meant loss of online access as standard is the most 
basic of the subscription formats available from Blackwell. We 
also ended up with print copies we didn't want!

Since renewal information from our agent is almost always based 
on the current year's pricing policy it doesn't help us too much 
in identifying where changes in renewal instructions from 
ourselves to our agents may be necessary. It also doesn't help us 
identify changes of publisher, because the information will be 
based on the current year's publisher. I spend a lot of time 
trawling publisher sites trying to prempt these problems when 
checking for such pricing policy changes normally in 
August/September, but the information isn't always there at the 
time that I need it. It is also extremely arduous and 
time-consuming, time most of us don't have. In many cases we've 
found out later that the publisher had changed their pricing 
policy, but that information wasn't available to us at the time 
we needed it. That's one of the problems - how do we keep up to 
date with publishers pricing policies? We deal with hundreds of 
publishers which I'm sure is a situation common to all libraries. 
Some even change their policy from year to year. It is an added 
complication that journals may move from one publisher to another 
one with different pricing policies.

It's all a bit of a nightmare, so I am not surprised by your 
observations about what happened to DUP renewals this year.

I hope this all makes sense and that it is helpful to you.

Cheers
Lesley

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lesley Crawshaw, Faculty Information Consultant
Learning and Information Services
University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, AL10 9AB
email: l.a.crawshaw@herts.ac.uk
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~