Changing e-resource platforms

I did intend to blog about e-resource platforms in January, so here’s a slightly belated update!

One of the events which makes an e-resource manager’s heart sink is the announcement either that a supplier is updating their platform, or that they are effectively ‘moving house’ to a brand new platform.

2013 ended with the relaunch of the Royal College of Nursing’s new platform (and their pricing policy, which has caused a minor stir on discussion lists), the news that Maney have decided to pull their titles from aggregrator Ingenta and instead move to Metapress and their own platform, the move of Informs titles to the Atypon platform, and the much-publicised and welcome reboot of the Box of Broadcasts. These were joined in early 2014 by the new Web of Science (which has thrown out the ‘Knowledge’ tag and gone back to a name known from old), a new release of Ovid SP, and the news that Emerald’s platform will be slowly changing over the next few months. We are also waiting for the date when the British Education Index is removed from Proquest and relaunched in its new EBSCO home.

Let’s look at the implications of this:

1. Link resolvers will need to be updated. This relies on the publisher to let the resolver supplier know of the change including any new URLs, and to send through details of any database changes which will need to be created within these systems. This also includes details of titles to be removed from existing databases (not always as simple as it sounds as there may be redirects or some overlap in content in both old and new homes). And let us not forget, once something is in your link resolver you need to be able to find time to test it and ensure everything is working OK.

2. Authentication methods need to be set up on the new or improved site so that access is seamless. If the old site was accessible via Shibboleth or EZProxy, then the new one should be too. Subscribers should be migrated across so that user metrics or IP ranges are in place on the new site. The one thing which seems to fail in these changes is the authentication when surely this should be the first thing to be checked and passed before platform launch. Generally speaking an end user will put convenience and consistency over what we used to refer to as ‘bells and whistles’ i.e. the look and feel of a new site. If you can’t access something, the platform is just another pretty picture around the content.

3. User guides, workbooks, slides and training materials will need to be updated. This takes time – if a new platform is changing significantly it is sometimes wise to allow a sneak peek (as Mintel and Passport GMID did a few years ago) so that trainers can plan for minor or major changes.

4. There’s rarely or ever a fanfare of publicity on these occasions. So a plea to publishers, put something on your old sites to warn/inform people of the changes. BoB was very good on the publicity front, and the new site is worth the wait, and we did know about the planned move of Maney from Ingenta, but sometimes you need to know where to look and your end users (not librarians) just don’t read the listservs!

Putting a robust workflow in place to capture any changes (we use a mix of shared mailbox, spreadsheet and alerting) will lessen any additional tasks which come alongside a platform change; however I would always recommend taking the pragmatic approach of ‘well, if it goes wrong, we can fix it’ rather than impersonating the ostrich and hoping for the best.

I wish any publisher well who sets out to update their service and make it more accessible and engaging to the end user – just a bit of thought about how it will impact on those who pay for your products would always be appreciated. Gold stars to those who do this well, and may there be many more of you.

E-resources matters of 2013

This year was very much one where Open Access came to the forefront, mainly thanks to the continuing effects of the Finch report. Research-intensive universities were given money to spend on Gold OA publishing, and smaller teaching universities, with their REF 2014 scores in mind, had to start thinking about how to bring OA to the attention of their academics.

In terms of e-resources the effect was two-fold. First, a high number of purely OA journals continue to be born and grow, even in already saturated fields. Whether they are all of good quality is debatable, and there were a couple of issues around plagarism or a lack of peer review which might make an author pause when it comes to smaller, unknown serial publishers. The second effect of this OA explosion was in terms of serial pricing, especially for titles in ‘big deals’ which had become either hybrid or totally OA. The ‘who pays’ and ‘why’ questions have never been more pertinent, and 2014 will be a year – I think – where historic pricing models may finally bite the dust.

From an administration point of view, licensing remains a minefield, especially post-cancellation access and entitlements. Easy to interpret a clause which states that you retain access to the years you have paid for, but it needs exemplary record-keeping on the part of the subscriber to be able to prove that entitlement sometimes. Agents records usually go back six years, publishers records often less. Changes of LMS systems can lose the continuity which can prove you had a subscription – title changes and transfers can complicate the picture. Even long-standing ‘big deals’ can cause problems if there has been a change of negotiating agent, or if the original paperwork is lacking. I would argue that the ‘off switch’ should not be employed quite so freely as it is where licensing seems to ensure post-cancellation access, and some publishers are certainly better at dealing with this issue than others.

Pricing policies continue to cause concern in the e-field. Those of us with long memories can remember the introduction of tiered pricing based on institutional size, which came in over a decade ago, with a justification that a larger institution in terms of student body, or an institution with high usage figures, should pay more than their smaller or low usage peers. You may not agree with this thesis when you consider the outlay in providing the end product on subscription is exactly the same, but e-journals have always been the money-spinners their print cousins were not. I remain intrigued at how journals are priced, but there never seems to be an easy answer.

2014 will also, I feel, be a turning point for hosting fees, that is where a subscriber pays to access a service on a third-party platform rather than saving content to their own servers. What is a ‘fair’ level for a charge for hosting, and should this be imposed across the board or on a case-by-case basis?

Finally, will there ever be a time when publisher platforms have any resemblance to each other in terms of usability? There have been many innovations whereby platforms have been developed to showcase a product, or integrate various features which may been seen to be an improvement (what we in the 1990s called ‘bells and whistles’). What we don’t have, yet, is a simple system relating to authentication, with a core terminology which makes a system easy to access and use. Attempts have been made to make ‘Shibboleth’ easy to use in the UK, but if you are away from your home institution, even logging in can be a puzzle few can master. Merging book and journal content on a platform might seem a great step forward, but unless you make your content easy to navigate, the content is as good as lost.

Feel free to share your high and low points of the e-resource year …