A Serial Killer: why the online renewal process can often be so painful and what Ingenta is doing to make it easier
The end of the calendar year can be a challenging time for those managing electronic access. The end of one subscription and start of another caused relatively few problems in the paper world, where if a renewal notice was somehow mislaid, the sending of the following year’s first issue to cover the “grace period” would usually mean that there was little if any break in service for the reader. At worst, if no grace period was offered, there would be a brief time during which new issues were not received, but back issues remained available on the shelves.With electronic resources the renewals process becomes more fraught. If a subscription renewal is not received in time there is the possibility that all access may be cut off, rendering the entire publication inaccessible, not just the first issues of the new year. The resulting loss of access leads to frustration for the patron and a headache for the librarian.
There are new problems for publishers to face too: with paper subscriptions it mattered very little if a new subscription was created every year, with a new subscription number and a new customer record, as long as issues were shipped out and eventually reached the check-in desk, via either a street address or PO box number. With electronic access the publisher must ensure that renewed access is exactly that: a renewal for an existing customer, complete with their already-registered IP addresses, and not a new subscription for a “new” customer.
As concern about these issues has grown over the past few years it has increasingly become standard practice to offer an electronic grace period to cover any problems that may arise from the renewals process. Ingenta fully supports this practice and we have been encouraging our publisher clients to allow such gracing for the past five years. With the publisher’s permission we extend all current subscriptions through to the end of March, giving the publisher an additional three months to receive and process renewal information without the worry that access will be cut off for their library customers. No action is required on the part of the librarian, who can be confident that losing access on IngentaConnect is one less thing to worry about at this busy time of year.
Additional resources
The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers strongly endorses the guidelines on gracing and renewals drawn up by the Association of Subscription Agents.