RE: Elsevier's Approach to Pricing

["Richardson, Donald" <drichard@WPI.EDU>]

I had the same reaction as Kitty Porter when I realized that our users
would need to create personal profiles to access the non-subscribed
Science Direct content. Anticipating user questions and complaints about
this, we set up a web page with directions for creating the personal
profile (http://www.WPI.EDU/Academics/Library/Ejournals/sdprofile.html).

We've had Science Direct in place for about six weeks, and while there
have been some questions from users about creating a profile, there really
haven't been any complaints. So far users seem pleased to have desktop
access to a much wider range of full text resources. Our interlibrary loan
librarian has noticed already that access to non-subscribed journals in
Science Direct has had an impact on our outgoing ILL traffic.

As for requiring usernames and passwords, I'm less annoyed with the
Science Direct personal profiles than I am with those publishers that
demand a usernames and passwords in order to access journals to which we
subscribe. I was glad to see that Wiley Interscience recently changed
their policy on that.
 
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Don Richardson
Reference/Systems Librarian
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
drichard@wpi.edu
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