transferred right into nonexistence

i talked to a publisher rep yesterday about the situation with transferred titles and i’m afraid it is more stomach-churning than i anticipated. we recently discovered that an e-journal title to which we should have perpetual (i.e., forever) access had not only moved to a different publisher (without notifying us), we now do not have access to the content at the new publisher. i wanted to find out more about how this transition usually goes so i asked a lot of nosy questions. i wanted to discover if this was an anomaly or the norm.

the publisher rep reported that most publisher/provider systems simply aren’t built to handle the kind of data required when a title moves from one publisher to another. if your institution has an individual e-journal title purchase not made through a consortium, you are in pretty good shape because their systems are built to handle that. if you license a package, and the package was negotiated by a consortium, then you are in sad, sad shape. it sounded to me like if your holdings were customized as part of a consortial purchase, you can pretty much kiss any guarantee of perpetual access goodbye.

the advice we were given was to keep an annual title list for all of your e-journal packages, keep a holdings list, and check access to those contents on a systematic basis. as i mentioned in a blog post last year, nobody’s keeping track of this stuff on your behalf. you don’t have a title list or a holdings list? ask for one. go. do it now, especially before you discard your print copies that duplicate the online content.