Re: Print-Only Subscription Trend

[Kim Steinle <ksteinle@dukeupress.edu>]

Lesley,

Thank you for your thorough response. We understand that budget 
time occurs before pricing is out, which is why we made our best 
effort to have pricing available June 1st this year.

In contacting institutions who subscribed to print-only for 2006, 
we found that many did indeed want to switch to a format which 
includes electronic access. We will contact the remaining 
print-only subscribers again to make sure no one is losing access 
inadvertently.

We also realize that Philosophical Review, which moved to Duke 
University Press for 2006 from being self-published at Cornell, 
has caused confusion, so I'd like to take this opportunity to 
clarify where things stand with this title. The first two 2006 
Duke issues are ready to go, and have been for quite a while, but 
we are waiting for Cornell to catch up on the prior issues and 
mail the full 2005 volume to subscribers before we mail our 
issues. We were advised by librarians and subscription agents not 
to send anything out for 2006 before the 2005 volume had 
completed. But we also realize our subscribers are eagerly 
awaiting the content. Therefore we will launch the title on 
HighWire in the next couple of weeks, including all the 2005 
issues as well as the first two issues for 2006, so that it's 
only the print issues that are delayed. We plan on communicating 
with our subscribers when the issues are available on HighWire 
and when the print issues are due to mail.  We are also working 
with subscription agents to alert previous subscribers when the 
schedule is caught up and how they can renew for 2006, since a 
number of libraries are likely to be caught off guard when the 
journal suddenly catches up by putting out six issues in the span 
of a few months. Hopefully we can inform everyone through this 
combination, and we'll keep trying until the journal's 
circulation is back to normal. We have not made a decision 
regarding POEISIS yet, but we will try to finalize this decision 
by the time of our communication about the title.

I would be happy to answer any other questions about 
Philosophical Review. Although the situation is not ideal, we 
would like to make the transition as painless as possible.

Kim

Lesley Crawshaw wrote:

> 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
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~