Re: Subscription package renewals - agency vs. direct? John Lucas 24 Jun 2008 13:16 UTC
Hello Henriette and all, If you remove some of your publisher packages from the subscription agency, you may reduce the amount of your invoice to a point where the service charge on your remaining subscriptions may increase. Also, you may lose an agency discount on the journal titles and pay the full price through the publisher. If you take advantage of any early renewal / early payment discounts by your subscription agency(s), this will also be reduced. We have 2 'consortia package' deals. One 'consortia package' has the titles spread over 4 of our subscription agents. Initially there was some confusion, but the agents now send us a separate invoice for these titles. The consortia headquarters that deals with the publisher sends us a list of the titles with agents which is easily verified and any titles are added, or removed. If we wished, we could move all of the titles to one agent and redistribute other titles to help even out the accounts and limit the effects of another possible (Faxon) debacle. However our current set up show that we try to treat every agent fairly. With the other package, it was such a mess at the renewal of the first year, that it was decided to go directly to the publisher for our yearly renewals. This did have an effect on our service fee from some of the subscription agents. A VERY late acceptance of the terms of this publishers' package and signing of the contract, the conversion from Print to E only on this package combined, payment for print already having occured, with trying get to refund print payments from the publisher's various publishing centers and then billing at E rates, was so convoluted and is still not untangled satisifactorily that, well ... Look at the contracts to see if it is financially advantageous to the library, and worth a little extra effort on your part. For me, that is part of "And other duties as assigned" and I have felt the effort is worth it to give the director another example for saying "we are doing all that we can to get the most out of our budget . With Best Regards, John Lucas Serials Librarian University of Mississippi Medical Center 2500 North State St Jackson, MS 39216-4505 (PH) (601) 984-1277 (FAX) ( 601) 984-4569 JLUCAS@ROWLAND.UMSMED.EDU >>> "Ilyes, Henriette" <heni@RAND.ORG> 6/23/2008 3:16 PM >>> Hello, We are in the process of renewing our subscriptions through our subscription agent, and I was wondering if any of you out there have ever tried to order or renew your major journal packages directly with the publishers (e.g. Springer, Sage, Elsevier, etc) rather than through your subscription agent. Even though we subscribe through an agency, some publishers require us to verify the subscriptions we receive through packages directly. We are also part of a consortium, so if lists (sometimes long lists) need to be checked, I spend numerous hours on trying to figure out whose list is accurate: publisher, consortium, the agent's, or our own records. I'd like to know the following: 1. If you've done this, have you found it more effective/efficient dealing directly with publishers? 2. Have you found that publishers respond to claims, customer service questions, etc. in a timely manner? Have you found that they would rather deal with the subscription agency? 3. Do you feel overwhelmed when dealing with publisher title lists directly throughout the year instead of the "big" renewals once or twice a year? Are there any other questions or issues you encountered? Thank you. Henriette Ilyes ___________________________________ Henriette Ilyes Library Information Systems Administrator RAND Library Acquisitions (310)393-0411 ext. 7909 (310)451-7029 (fax) Henriette_Ilyes@rand.org __________________________________________________________________________ This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message. Individuals who have received this information in error or are not authorized to receive it must promptly return or dispose of the information and notify the sender. Those individuals are hereby notified that they are strictly prohibited from reviewing, forwarding, printing, copying, distributing or using this information in any way.