Actually I'm grateful to Swets for setting up this program, and I
hope other vendors follow suit. In our case we received the
announcement well after our cutoff date of September 1st, and
simply selected the default option (Swets will automatically
upgrade to print-plus-online unless the price increase exceeds
10%). This will save us a lot of headaches.

A much bigger problem is publishers waiting until very late in the
year to make the decision to start charging for online access,
which leaves us scrambling to make decisions and notify our vendors
before the cutoff date for renewals. Publishers also need to take
more responsibility for notifying vendors of the changes. Our
customer service representative at Ebsco told me they were
completely unaware that Sage had begun offering different
subscription options until I sent a message listing which
subscriptions we wanted to change in 2005.

--On Monday, October 11, 2004 1:28 PM -0700 Aimee Algier
<AAlgier@SCU.EDU> wrote:

> Are other libraries upset that Swets only gave us a little over a
> week to decide whether we want to pay for online titles that were
> free from the publisher? They gave us three options: print plus
> paid online, online only or print only. We had to scramble to
> make a very hasty decision in order to beat their deadline of
> October 8th.
>
>
> Aimee Algier
> Head of Serials
> Orradre Library
> Santa Clara University
> aalgier@scu.edu

Christopher Allen Waldrop
Serials Coordinator
Order Services Department
Vanderbilt University Library
Ph: 615-343-3831
Fax: 615-343-8834