RE: Librarians push back against complicated e-packages

["Richard Jasper" <ap8401@wayne.edu>]

Many thanks for passing this along, Ann.

I don't know about the rest of you, but processing our electronic renewal
for One Very Big Publisher is something that annually takes probably about
a month's worth of time on the part of one of our collection management
coordinator's, plus about a week's worth of input from our acquisitions
librarian AND me.

Decades ago librarians said "enough already!" when dealing with individual
publishers and HAPPILY agreed to pay subscription agents a service fee so
that we wouldn't have to go through this rigamarole.

Richard P. Jasper
Director, Resource Services
Wayne State University Libraries
Detroit, MI 48202

-----Original Message-----

E-Subs: Back to the Future

At the SLA conference this week, a standing-room-only session pitted irate
content buyers, ready for a fight, against a panel of publishers and
aggregators. Highest on buyers' exasperation list is the extinction of the
print-journal purchasing model - from simpler times when subscription
agents consolidated subscriptions, ordering and invoicing, and provided
standard annual price listings. "Why can't you publish your [e-journal]
subscription prices and remove the car-dealership bartering from the
process?" one frustrated buyer asked, to enthusiastic applause.

Buyers are fed up with having to negotiate terms, publisher by publisher,
subscription by subscription, and devoting increased staff time to a
low-value activity. There is some progress; Elsevier and EBSCO described a
partnership that's making e-journal subscriptions work more like the old
subscription agent system after prices are set, but the constant
requirement for price and terms negotiation has yet to be adequately
addressed. Outsell's newly published Briefing on corporate information
professionals (see below) identifies a slowdown in the pace of libraries'
move to digital environments. The complexity of e-journal purchasing
models and methods is certainly one reason for that slowdown.

Buyers are also increasingly interested in pay-per-view, where the
document is the unit of purchase, not the journal, and libraries continue
to replace some subscriptions with pay per view. The bottom line is that
publishers, aggregators, and document delivery providers have yet to find
the models that fit the needs of these frustrated buyers. That's what
happens when vendors are more concerned with preserving revenue than with
trying to find the new model that fits the new technology.

[SNIP]

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