Academic Press/IDEAL to Elsevier/ScienceDirect transition planning

[jklai <jklai@hkucc.hku.hk>]

Dear colleagues,

Our library has begun our negotiation with Elsevier regarding our Academic
Press/IDEAL titles for 2003. Elsevier has insisted to continue to use the
AP Base Price formula in our existing APPEAL license for the new contract.
That means we will have to maintain a minimum subscription value of 1997
holdings x 2003 prices. We find this quite unacceptable, because we've
heard that, for many libraries, the cost of the IDEAL package has been
decoupled from the historical print subscription list, and also because
the new pricing doesn't include access to unsubscribe AP titles and we
will have to pay for the so called 'freedom collection'.

We would very much appreciate it you could share with us your experience.

Sincerely,
Janny Lai
Collection Development
University of Hong Kong Libraries
Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong
(852) 2859-7005
jklai@hkucc.hku.hk