Re: Subscription package renewals - agency vs. direct? Rosella Layton 24 Jun 2008 17:09 UTC
Hello Henriette, The University of Oregon has a mixture of agency (Cambridge, Sage, Springer) and direct (Blackwell Wiley, Elsevier) deals with the major publishers. All of these were deals negotiated through our consortium. For the 2008 renewal we just switched our direct deal for Springer back to a subscription agent-thinking the renewal process would be a whole lot easier in the long run. 1) Yes, I think it is more effective to deal through the subscription agent because they often have a better idea of how each package deal should work. They will also obtain your reconciliation spreadsheet and your final invoice. If there are discrepancies in the invoice, they will work with the publisher to get the billing corrected. But the important thing to note, though, is you will still continue to have to do your own reconciliation review by spread- sheet, even if it is billed through the subscription agent. There's no workaround for that one. And, that you will pay an agent's subscription fee on top of the price of the subscription 2) I don't have any knowledge of whether the publishers prefer to work through an agent. But I do know it works better for us time-wise. As you have said it takes countless hours for you to work on these big package deals. If access is lost for a group of titles it works a whole lot better for us to have the agent contact the publisher about the access as a group of titles. 3) Yes, it is overwhelming to go through all those big title lists each year. Especially with the yearly coming-and-going of titles with the big publishers. And it creates another layer of the renewal process for us by having the majority of our titles renewed through our regular annual renewal process, followed by these big package deals that are their IMHO own renewal subset. I find there are things we don't catch sometimes and we flag them internally in our ILS to catch them at the following year's renewal. I hope this helps. -- Rosella Layton, Renewals Unit Supervisor Acquisitions Dept./Serials Knight Library 1299 University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403-1299 U.S.A. phone: (541) 346-1842 fax: (541) 346-3485 website: libweb.uoregon.edu/colldev/ > Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:16:45 -0700 > From: "Ilyes, Henriette" <heni@RAND.ORG> > Subject: Subscription package renewals - agency vs. direct? > > 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