New subscription-monitoring service from Stanford's HighWire Press

[David Goodman <dgoodman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>]

I post this here with permission from the originator, because I think it
is both important and promising that such a service is available. I hope
all publishers and distributors wil emulate it.

__________

To Colleagues on the notification list for HighWire Subscription
changes:

Last year, librarians who administer institutional ejournal subscriptions
asked if there wasn't some way that we could alert them when a
subscription lapsed/expired -- i.e., when their patrons lost access -- so
they didn't face the situation in which it was the patron who discovered
the problem and left the librarian scrambling to restore lost access.

This sounded easy.  After all, if HighWire could turn off access, surely
we could tell you when we did so.  It wasn't that easy.  However, we've
developed some tools that let us do the best we can with the data
publishers provide to us.  (Some of the limitations of these tools are
described in the section "Limitations" at the end of this note.)

----Introduction:

We are now making available a service that will alert you when access from
a particular subscription ends, and in some cases this service will allow
you to get advance notice weeks in advance of loss of access.

We are particularly anxious to release this capability before the grace
periods many publishers set this year begin to expire. This is expecially
important because of the RoweCom debacle, so we wanted to deliver this
capability rapidly, despite its limitations.

----How to use the new Subscription-Expiration Alert Service:

If you are not the person who administers subscriptions at your
institution, then you may want to forward this note to that person.

To use this new tool:

- You must be a registered user of the HighWire portal.

- Go to http://highwire.stanford.edu and sign in with your
  email address and password.  The email address must be one
  that you use for administering the subscriptions you want to
  monitor.  [If you haven't registered, do so; it takes a
  minute.]

- Click on the 'For Institutions' button at the top center of
  the home page.

- On the 'Information and Services for Institutional Subscribers'
  page, in the center/red column, look for 'Manage Subscription 
  Expiration'  and click on the bullet point underneath it.

- Fill out the form to indicate your preferences for alerts
- Click 'Create Alert'

You may also want to click the link to "Review any expired subscriptions
you administer"

since the new alert system will only tell you about subscriptions that
expire *after* you sign up.  But this 'Review' link will tell you about
ones that have already expired.

After you 'Create Alert', you'll receive an overnight email whenever there
is an expiration to notify you about.

----Limitations of the new service:

As I'm sure librarians know even better than I, the long chain beteen
library, agent, publisher, fulfillment vendor and HighWire is subject to
"fragility" shall we say.  Trying to alert you to access problems without
crying wolf is a challenge. We hope we've struck the right balance:

1) The system can alert you about a subscription expiring, but your access
to that content may continue.  That is, if your institution has multiple
subscriptions to a title, one might expire but your patrons will continue
to get access under the other.

2) You might have intended for a subscription to expire. HighWire can't
see what you don't *intend* to renew, only that access has changed.

3) We can't alert you in advance of expiration for all subscriptions.  
For many journals, we don't get expiration dates in the data supplied from
publishers and for these we can't alert in advance; for these we can only
alert on expiration.  We've made a list of such journals available from
the sign-up form.

4) You will get a single email from the alerting system any day that it
detects expirations to inform you of.  The one email may contain multiple
subscription alerts.  It would delay the release of this product by a few
weeks to provide one email for each subscription, but testers have told us
they would like this feature in the future.

5) We haven't provided an interface to allow an administrator to choose to
receive alerts on some journals but not others.  Many administrators have
60+ journals, and it seemed asking people to check a lot of boxes, or
uncheck a lot of boxes, would create a daunting form.  Simpler to give all
or none.

5) Unfortunately, we can't send alerts in advance of expiration in the
most critical time of the year for expirations. Publishers don't all send
us updated subscription information before the end of each calendar year.  
That is, we may not know that your subscription to a journal has been
renewed until January 1 of the new year.  And so we can't accurately tell
you **from the data HighWire has** on (for example) December 15th whether
a subscription has or hasn't been renewed for the next year.

Even with these limitations we thought this new alerting capability was
better to have available than not, since it provides a way for a librarian
to know of a problem before patrons will be denied access. We think this
is an important addition to the set of tools librarians have to ensure
service continuity in an electronic world, and hope you find it useful.

John Sack, Director
            HighWire Press, Stanford University
            Phone: 650-723-0192; fax: 650-725-9335
            http://highwire.stanford.edu/~sack
            sack@stanford.edu
___

Dr. David Goodman
Princeton University Library
and
Palmer School of Library and Information Science, LIU
dgoodman@princeton.edu