RE: Librarians push back against complicated e-packages

["Heather Morrison" <hmorrison@ola.bc.ca>]

Perhaps you need a clause in your contract allowing for a prorated refund
in the event access is not possible due to circumstances within the
publisher's or vendor's control?  If you lose access a quarter of the
time, why not ask for a quarter of your money back?

a personal thought by,
Heather Grace Morrison, BC ELN

liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu writes:
>You're correct in assuming that a publisher *should* be interested in
>knowing that there's been subtracted-value from one of its titles because
>of access problems, but, alas, reality has shown me that such is not the
>case. As I tried to describe, there are really two problems which must be
>addressed:
>
>1. Some publishers apparently will not work with serials vendors in
>arranging the registration necessary for online access, thus the vendors
>report to us (the intended users) that *we* must initiate the registration
>process ourselves. Why some publishers can not or will not work with
>serials vendors in this regard is something which ought to be further
>probed.
>
>2. When we have gone about the business of initiating our own access
>registration -- at the publisher's request and the serials vendor's
>direction -- we have run into blank walls in the form of non-returned
>phone calls, non-answered e-mails, etc. (and I hasten to add that this is
>not a general rule for all publishers we've encountered but it does
>exist).
>
>3. The staff time necessary to jump through all the hoops which the
>publisher requires is costly. If there were a satisfying result, the cost
>to the library could be 'swallowed' as part of the price of doing business
>(which, however, we pay our serials vendors to do for us but in this case
>the publisher stands in the way of allowing), so the real incentive here
>is, unfortunately, for the library to cancel the title to which access
>proves to be difficult to obtain and, in a real economic sense, a
>financial loss in terms of subscription price for value received (i.e.,
>access to their product).
>
>It seems to me that if a publisher wants to sell their product, they would
>be more than willing to accomodate their prospective clients rather than
>erecting barriers to access to their product. But, like all things in the
>marketplace, it would certainly appear that a certain flavor of Darwinism
>will eventually determine which products survive and this survival will be
>based on more factors than merely subscription price. In our particular
>case, our IT transactions are handled by a member of the library staff, so
>inflexibility is not a problem (I can attest to that), rather it is the
>unresponsiveness of the publisher's personnel which obstructs access and
>by so doing withholds services which the library has paid to have.
>
>Peter Picerno