RE: Chicago Journals 2007 subscription rates now available

["Lesley Crawshaw" <l.a.crawshaw@herts.ac.uk>]

Hi Bernd-Christoph,

I don't believe you are alone at all - I just think there are so
many changes to pricing taking place at the moment that it's hard
to keep up with it all! However as you already know this isn't a
change for Chicago journals as cancellation of a subscription to
their journals has always resulted in total loss of online access
to a title. Nevertheless I take your point about not having
perpetual access to license and paid-for content.

My other concern is that I do not accept that tiered pricing
based purely on an institution's FTEs is the way forward. This is
an extremely crude way to price products and is biased against
institutions with large numbers of undergraduates, and smaller
levels of research active staff/students. It is after all
researchers who make the largest use of journals, undergraduate
use is often a learning experience. Anyway, we now find ourselves
in Tier 4 - and guess what the pricing for this is not publicly
available (see
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/2007_inst_rates.pdf) and we have
to contact their journal sales for a quote I presume. Why isn't
the pricing for Tier 4 institutions out there for everyone to
see?

I notice that Chicago Journals say they talked to customers and
agent partners about this as well as conducting focus groups to
get this equitable pricing. It would be useful to know who these
people are that they talked to and whether they are indeed
representative of the different parts of the community.

I am also concerned that having some exceptions to this new
Enterprise-Wide License i.e. The Astronomical Journal, The
Astrophysical Journal, The Astrophysical Journal Supplement
Series, and Publications of the Astronomical Society of the
Pacific adds yet another complication for institutions who have a
mix of Chicago journals. The journal renewal season is getting
more and more complicated as each publisher introduces their own
new pricing regimes.

Like you we will probably for the meantime stay with a
print/online or online only subscription with a usage concurrency
of one. However, this is a retrograde step for us. Of course,
since COUNTER usage statistics are not yet available for our
Chicago journals subscriptions we won't be able to know until
after the event whether we took the right decision for our users!

That's all for now.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lesley Crawshaw, Faculty Information Consultant,
Learning and Information Services
University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, AL10 9AB
email: l.a.crawshaw@herts.ac.uk
  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of
bernd-christoph.kaemper@ub.uni-stuttgart.de
Sent: 24 July 2006 23:18
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Chicago Journals 2007 subscription rates now available

Are we alone in seeing a problem with this announcement? This is=20
the only case I know of a scholarly publisher that introduces=20
tiered pricing and e-only access without offering libraries=20
perpetual access to licensed and paid-for content.

The sales division was not very helpful in providing=20
explanations.

When I pointed out that the press release at=20
<http://www.portico.org/news/050506.html> only says that UCP has=20
an agreement with Portico for only 4 titles so far and that it=20
does not even mention that this agreement covers also the=20
provision of perpetual access to previously paid for content of=20
lapsed subscriptions, I received the following terse unsigned=20
response:

"As I mentioned, access to our backfile requires a current=20
subscription.  We do not offer perpetual access as you are=20
defining it.

The information I shared about Portico and what has been posted=20
on our website is all we can share right now.  I'm sorry that you=20
feel it does not answer your question.  We update our web pages=20
regularly, so I would encourage you to check back in the coming=20
weeks."

At Stuttgart University we will stay for now with the still=20
available offer to continue Subscriptions at a non-tiered price=20
in the print-plus-electronic format (according to UCP, Electronic=20
access is included without a geographic restriction, but with a=20
usage concurrency of one, which will be enough for all our UCP=20
titles).

Best regards, Bernd-Christoph Kaemper, Stuttgart University=20
Library


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