Jessica,
Our process seems to be the same as many others in SERIALST. We use EBSCO as our subscription agent for ejournals, too.
1. Wait until you think payment might have been received by the publisher and check access.
2. If nothing, go to EBSCOnet and see if there are any clues about additional activation requirements. While there, put together customer numbers, payment information, etc.
3. Contact the publisher. Include IP ranges again (just in case).
4. Contact EBSCO Customer Service if you wait longer than a week or two for a response.
If we contact the publisher, I ask for Administrator rights/accounts/information to access usage statistics, branding, etc. at the same time. This seems to take a much longer time and sometimes I wonder if we have to call out the National Guard to get the information.
Finally, the qualifiers (“mostly”, “usually”, “some”) in all of the previous responses should give you an indicator of what to expect. Online serials is no less messy than print serials…just different.
Judith
Judith Nagata
Electronic Resources Librarian
HACC, Central Pennsylvania’s Community College
Library Central Services
One HACC Dr., Whittaker 226F
Harrisburg, PA 17110
Phone: (717) 780-2535
From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@list.uvm.edu]
On Behalf Of Jessica Harris
Sent: Monday, May 19, 2014 3:25 PM
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: [SERIALST] Process for activating new serials
Hello, All,
I have a question regarding other libraries’ procedures for subscribing to new e-journals. If you’re working with an agent (we’re working with EBSCO), at what point do you contact the publisher to request access to the journal? I understand that most publishers won’t connect you until payment is received. However, I’m finding that even once payment has been processed, the publishers often don’t contact us to let us know that we’re connected (or that they need our IP ranges, signed license, etc.). Because of this, I’ve been adding every new e-journal acquisition to a calendar to alert myself to follow up in one month’s time. Often, when I check to see if we have access after a month, we still do not. I then follow up directly with the publisher to see what we need to do. As you can imagine, this can be very time consuming. What do you do when you acquire new e-journals? Do you contact the publisher right away to get the ball rolling & trust that they’ll follow through until it’s connected? Is there a better way to go about this? Thank you in advance for any help you can give here!
Jessica Harris
Electronic Resources Librarian
University Library
Santa Clara University
500 El Camino Real
Santa Clara, CA 95053
408-554-5356
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