We have been using Article Select tokens for several months and it has been mostly a good experience for us.  We set it up as a mediated service administered through our ILL department, primarily as a way to obtain articles for faculty for journals to which we do not subscribe due to very high cost. Using this service, we are able to get higher quality formatted articles to them with a much quicker turn-around than via ILL.

There have only been two problems.

(1)  When patrons click on an article to which we do not have a subscription they first get this message: "Select the confirm option to access the Article. All users at Eastern Kentucky University  will have access to this Article for 24 hours."  At this point, many users would probably just stop and give up.  If they do click "confirm," then they get this message: "Eastern Kentucky University makes access to this Article possible by purchasing Article Select tokens that provide access to publications to which it does not subscribe. Please login below or contact your librarian for this service."  At which point they have to go to our website and find the contact information for our ILL department and submit the request manually.  This is not very user friendly navigation!

This could be mitigated very easily if it weren't for the second problem.

(2) Because we are not an "enhanced" Wiley customer, they will not allow us to enable our SFX link resolver for outbound linking in Wiley.  If they did, when users got an article to which we had no paid access, they could simply click on our SFX link and automatically request the article via ILL, which for Wiley would then trigger our ILL staff to use a token.  This is exactly how we handle our ScienceDirect "prepaid transactional" account and it works seamlessly for the user, and for us as well.

We continue to hope that Wiley (and other publishers who don't allow OpenURL outbound linking) will take a larger view and realize that they are only hurting themselves by not allowing full OpenURL integration.  The recent JSTOR debacle is a good example of this.

~Kelly

Kelly Smith
Electronic Resources Collection Librarian
Eastern Kentucky University Libraries
859-622-3062
kelly.smith2@eku.edu
http://libguides.eku.edu/profile/KellySmith

From: Simmons, Marianne [mailto:msimmons@SJFC.EDU]
Sent: Friday, September 10, 2010 9:36 AM
Subject: Wiley Article Select Tokens

Our library is considering trying Article Select tokens from Wiley.  I would appreciate comments from libraries that have used this program within the past year. What are the advantages or disadvantages from your perspective?  Are there any "surprise" problems? Is the delivery  time satisfactory? What is the library patron reaction to this type of access?
 
Thank you for any insight you may offer.  Marianne Simmons
 
Marianne Simmons | Head of Reference and Serials | St. John Fisher College | 585-385-7399 | msimmons@sjfc.edu