September 29, 2006

ANNOUNCEMENT: Elsevier and Wellcome Trust

Posted in News and Noteworthy, Publishers, Vendors at 9:43 am by Alexia

From MEDLIB-L

I am pleased to announce that Elsevier has made an agreement with the Wellcome Trust that allows authors who publish in Elsevier journals to comply with Wellcome Trust’s policy requiring grantholders to deposit final manuscripts of their research papers into PubMed Central. More information regarding this agreement is available on Elsevier.com, at the following URL:
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorshome.authors/wellcometrustauthors Information regarding the Wellcome Trust policy on PMC posting is available from: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/node3302.html

Please contact me (or your Elsevier representative) if you have any questions.

Tony McSean
Director of Library Relations
Elsevier
32 Jamestown Road
London NW1 7BY
+44 7795 960516
+44 20 7424 4242

September 1, 2006

Follow up to my rant

Posted in Publishers, Rants at 9:57 am by Alexia

Earlier this week I ranted about being billed by our journal vendor for an additional charge to a 2005 subscription. While I haven’t gotten an answer that satisfies me yet on that specific item I did find out that our vendor can mark our account so that any additional charges will be invoiced to us by May so that we can take care of them before the end of our fiscal year. This makes sense in a way. We renew our journals by September 1st. We get billed by our vendor in October. The publishers may or may not have set the subscription price for the upcoming year. We will get invoiced for additional charges. This still doesn’t explain how we are just now getting billed for a 2005 subscription but, at the very least, I am slowing getting our account set straight with our vendor in such a manner as to alleviate some of these problems.

August 29, 2006

RANT – Journal publishers

Posted in Publishers, Rants at 9:04 am by Alexia

This rant has been stewing for a while, years in fact, so bear with me for a moment.

I recently received an invoice from our journal vendor.  One of the line items was an additional charge to a journal for the 2005 subscription year.  Yes, 2005.  We are now nine months in to 2006.  Not only are we being charged an additional amount for an item we purchased 21 months ago, the amount is almost double what the original subscription rate was.

I cannot think of a single instance where a company can come back and charge me and additional fee for something I purchased in the past.  I understand that there may be a difference in cost from when we get the renewal notice in June to when the subscription starts in January.  I’m guessing most publishers haven’t set their 2007 rates in stone yet.  BUT, they really should have had their 2005 rates pretty well decided.

Is this a publisher issue, a vendor issue, or a bit of both?  I’m not really sure.  I’ve just kind of been rolling with the flow the last few years but have finally gotten to the point were enough is enough and I will push for answers.  Any tips or information already gleaned by anyone else would be greatly appreciated.