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