Greetings Rick and all,

You've hit a raw nerve here, so I'll take this opportunity to vent about
Nature and its various publishing arms.

Working in a very competitive, basic medical research institution, I can say
that price of the Nature journals (we get a lot of them) is not so much the
issue with us, but rather it is the quality of the electronic product. (We
went online only for nearly all our 400 journal subscriptions beginning with
2004.)

Specifically:
1.      Response time for Nature journals is abysmal!  This is a small
library, and we can frequently walk to the stacks, get an older issue and
scan/photocopy it faster than we can load and print the PDF.  (I might add
that we have high quality, high capacity, networked laser printers.)

2.      Print quality of PDFs is inconsistent.  One of our scientists called
me one day to say that she had printed a PDF and the quality was grainy and
faded.  I suggested it must be her printer because, after all, this was
NATURE.  But to humor her, I offered to print the article on our printer
and, lo and behold, the quality was grainy and faded just as she had found.
I thought this was an isolated incident that the publisher would want to
know about so they could fix it, so I contacted them by email and promptly
got phone calls from the executive editor of the journal and the executive
editor of the press in NYC who offered to send me a PDF of the desired
article, which turned out to be just a grainy as the one I printed here.  I
even did a test of 4 Nature titles, printing the PDF and photocopying the
same article from our print collection:  2 of the PDFs were very grainy
compared to the photocopy of the same article, and 2 were of equal or better
quality compared to the photocopy.  I explained this to the folks at Nature,
and they asked me to mail my samples to them to NYC to examine.  Eventually,
I got an email from Nature explaining that the articles were so dense that
they had to reduce the resolution of the PDF so it would print faster!  Well
that would be nice if the $#@!%^&* PDFs loaded and printed fast in the first
place, but they usually don't!

3.      Pushy and uninformed sales reps.  Yes, I get the emails that you
refer to, but I also get phone calls offering me special deals on backfiles,
new titles, etc.  Sometimes they call or email to offer me subscriptions
that I already subscribe to!!  Just last week I got an email offering me
Nature Microbiology Reviews Microbiology, which we've had since it began
publication in 2003.  It seems to me that this publisher has been yielded to
savvy marketing types who don't seem to understand the library niche of the
market.

I can deal with the pushy sales reps - "Sorry. Busy. Can't talk now."
Delete emails - the Nature folks are not the only people making cold calls
to libraries.  But the response time and quality of their electronic product
concerns me greatly.  Nature has a long and respected history as one of the
top tier science journals in the world, but they cannot continue to trade on
this reputation if the quality of their electronic product does not live up
to their reputation, and their reputation will get diluted by so many new
products carrying the Nature imprint.  I'm not buying any more Nature
journals until demand is so high I cannot avoid ordering, and even then I
may choose to order the print instead of the online.

Enough!  I've got more important work to do.

Danny

=======================
Daniel H. Jones, M.L.S.
Librarian
Preston G. Northrup Memorial Library
Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research
Shipping address:
     7620 NW Loop 410
     San Antonio, TX  78227-5301
Mailing address:
     P.O. Box 760549
     San Antonio, TX  78245-0549

Tel:  210-258-9426
Fax:  210-670-3313
Email:  djones@sfbr.org
=======================

-----Original Message-----
From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum
[mailto:SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU] On Behalf Of Rick Anderson
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2004 3:34 PM
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: [SERIALST] Nature's bizarre offer to save librarians' budgets

I'm sure I'm not the only one to have recently received an email
solicitation from Nature offering to help me "save my library's budget"
by selling me backfiles.  But am I the only one to have received it in
the wake of a renewal invoice filled with patently bizarre price
increases?

To wit: my institution's price for the EMBO Journal was $1,489 last
year.  This year the price has more than doubled, to $3,150.  Last year,
my institution subscribed to five of Nature's monthly/review titles, for
a total cost of $7,200; during the course of that year, we added one
more, and our total renewal price is now $9,500.  (That's actually down
from the original quote, which was $10,575 -- a 50% price increase for
20% more content.  When I squawked and asked for an explanation and
per-title price breakdown, I got a new quote instead.  I asked again for
a price-per-title breakdown, and am still waiting for it.)

It's one thing for a publisher to impose such bizarre price increases;
it's quite another for it to follow up the increases with a sales
solicitation that invokes the promise of budget savings!  At this point,
buying more content from Nature seems less like a way to save my
library's budget than a way to gamble with it irresponsibly.

----
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
(775) 784-6500 x273
rickand@unr.edu