Standing Order Model Kathy Bowersox 13 Sep 2006 16:45 UTC
Dear Mr Cohen, I've been following the SERIALS discussion on the unpredictability of many Haworth quarterly journals. Have you considered publishing under a STANDING ORDER plan, as opposed to the "subscription" model? Where a subscription is paid in advance, a standing order is paid when a volume or issue is published and distributed. Standing orders work great for annuals and unpredictable publications. Subscriptions work best when a periodicity is stated and the schedule is fulfilled within a given time frame (usually 12 months). On the other hand, a standing order is paid when the item is actually published and distributed, thus saving a library from paying in advance for a volume that may not appear for 2 or 3 years (a scary situation when the legislative auditor comes around.) I have many Standing Order (SO) titles included in my current subscription with EBSCO. The SO permits some ambiguity regarding expenditures for the coming subscripton year. We can track receipt history (and thus actual publication pattern) and, in combination with the publisher's announced schedule, we can make a good guess on how many issues/volumes to expect and set aside the funding for a particular title. The SO allows wiggle room for the publisher's production schedule, and it also allows the subscriber some wiggle room for funding. The SO is not a carte blanche -- reasonable adherence to an announced publishing forecast would still be expected from the publisher, and the SO subscriber is expected to pay for all issues published. Thomson/Gale has really cleaned up their act in the last 2 or 3 years. Of the 100 volumes expected from my SO last year, only 3 were not received on schedule. They were a week late. That's pretty good. And I knew exactly how much funding to set aside to cover that publication schedule. I hated to do it, but I cancelled all but one of my library's Haworth journal subscriptions back in 2002. We just could not absorb the unexpected cost of multiple volumes in a single subscription year. I especially wanted to keep our subscriptions to the library journals, as most issues were on current topics, readable and very informative. Since they were published simultaneously as monographs, we decided that we could order individual titles for the really important ones. That has not happened in practice. As I recall, Haworth would announce a 4-issue volume along with its price. The volume would arrive complete in 1 or 2 physical issues, which in itself is acceptable. The kicker came when the next volume was announced only 6 months after the previous volume's announcement. That publishing pattern is what we call "Two 4-issue volumes per year," and the frequency is eight no. per year. And the publisher gets paid twice for what we expected to be a single subscription term. Many of your journals (at least the ones I read) could easily work into a standing order plan. Acquisitions and serials librarians are the most upset at having to pay upfront for issues that don't come for months and years. This isn't only a matter of inconvenience, personal risk is involved. I must justify every expense to the auditors, and we're not supposed to pay for anything that was not received within the same fiscal year. The auditors make a small exception for subscriptions which must be paid in advance, but they still expect all issues to arrive within the first 6 months of the next fiscal year. I personally risk punitive fines and prison time every time a publisher does not meet an announced publication schedule. Believe me, Haworth isn't worth it! But, I still want to get your journals. If Haworth was to offer standing orders for Reference Librarian, Serials Librarian, Cataloging and Classification Quarterly, Collection Management, etc., you just might be pleased at the response. Just a thought. Kathy Kathlyn A. Bowersox E-mail: bowersox@lib.subr.edu Cataloging/Serials Librarian Office: (225) 771-2863 John B. Cade Library Fax: (225) 771-2866 Southern University Baton Rouge, LA 70813