EMBO Journal + EMBO Reports / expired access

[kaemper@ub.uni-stuttgart.de]

[please excuse multiple receipt of this message]

Dear list members, 

although Oxford University Press, the former publisher of EMBO Journal,
assured us that the grace period at HighWire would be at least three
months and although I communicated this to NPG and received no clear
message that the grace period would end earlier, the grace period at
HighWire apparently has ended on March 9.

As far as I know there was no communication of that fact by NPG. On the
HighWire website, for some time there was an entry "(to be determined)" in
place of the usual back issues policy entry on the overview page of free
back issues at HighWire. Only very recently, there was placed an entry
"until March 8" under "free trial period", but it was not at all clear
that this date would apply also to the grace period for former subscribers
to EMBO Journal.

As many of you are aware, the changes in pricing policy for the EMBO
Journal were announced very late in 2003; to make things worse, no pricing
table was provided to agencies, but each agency or subscriber had to
obtain an individual quote for each customer. As a result, even today a
number of institutions are still without a quote.

As expected NPG also did not manage to add the EMBO package to all
institutional accounts (e.g. those within our GASCO EMBO Consortium).  No
wonder that agencies and the NPG office itself is now flooded by
complaints from libraries that have lost access to EMBO journal.

I also find it irresponsible that until today I have received no answer
from either the publisher or the society to the question about permanent
access to paid content for this journal which was guaranteed as long as
the journal was published by OUP but is now in the limbo as NPG's standard
institutional site license does not acknowledge such archival rights, cf.
my message to liblicense-l and lis-e-journals of Feb 18, 2004 (Fwd: RE:
EMBO Journal / Archival access to paid-for content). It now has happened
what was to be expected: former subscribers no longer have access to
content of 2003 they paid for.

OUP supports the guidelines from ALPSP ('When a society journal changes
publisher', www.alpsp.org/socjourn1.pdf) and told us that the issue of
archival access to paid-for content ('perpetual access')  in respect of
The EMBO Journal was highlighted during the hand-over discussions between
OUP and NPG, but NPG and EMBO do not seem to care.

I would suggest that NPG should consider to extend the grace period as
originally planned (until end of March) and also should comment on how
they plan to give back access to paid issues of 2003 for all former
subscribers (the easiest way would be to temporarily switch the free back
issues policy to the same mode as for EMBO reports i.e.  to make 2003 open
access completely, and reinstate the 12 months moving wall from 2005 on).

In my view, there are many lessons to learn from this transition, which
was a nightmare in many aspects and we should certainly discuss these at
the next library advisory board meeting in New York in April.

Best regards,
Bernd-Christoph Kaemper, GASCO Nature Consortium

--
Bernd-Christoph Kaemper, Dipl.-Physiker, Bibl.-Rat 
Fachreferent f�r Physik und Koordination elektronischer Ressourcen 
Universit�tsbibliothek Stuttgart, Postfach 104941, 70043 Stuttgart 
Tel +49 711 121-3510, Fax +49 711 121-3502, kaemper@ub.uni-stuttgart.de