Update on 2007 Gracing and Renewals

You may remember that, last year, we implemented a new 7 Step Renewal Plan to try and resolve some of the problems that this process has, in the past, created for publishers and libraries. We strongly recommended to each of our publishers that they adhere to our standard 3 month grace period and happily, the vast majority of them agreed to do so. This, combined with improvements to our lapsing subscription notifications, ensured that last year's IngentaConnect renewals were processed more smoothly than ever. We continued to develop our renewals strategy throughout the year to build on its robustness and comprehensiveness.

Our monitoring of this year's renewals process indicated to us that not all publishers had been able to supply us with complete renewals information prior to the end of the three-month gracing period. We therefore agreed with those publishers affected that the gracing period should be extended by a further two weeks to ensure that our library customers' 2007 access was not incorrectly terminated. We then sent every library customer a list of those titles which, according to our current records, had not been renewed, enabling you to pinpoint those where renewals information had not been correctly passed on, and to support our efforts by also contacting the publisher or agent. If you received an email from us at the end of March but have not yet had a chance to review the attached subscription files, please be aware that we may not yet have been supplied with renewals information for the titles involved.

Since that time, the publishers involved have provided us with the additional data required to ensure that, to the best of our knowledge, all 2007 subscriptions have been renewed as appropriate. Therefore the gracing period will end on 13th April 2007 . At this point, 2007 access to those titles for which publishers or agents have not provided us with renewals information will be terminated. The end-date for your online access to such titles will revert, in most cases, to 31st December 2006. (We say "in most cases" because, although we recommend that publishers continue to provide access to previously-subscribed publication years, not all adhere to this policy).

At the point when the gracing period ends, we will inform you (by email) of any titles for which we did not receive your renewals data and to which your graced access has therefore been terminated. Although we work very hard to make this process as troublefree as possible for our library customers, the vast amounts of data involved could mean that a minority of errors in the data supplied to us are not adequately recognised and rectified. Our customer service and client management teams will be working closely together, and with our publisher and agent partners, during this period to assist you in reinstating any access. If you encounter any problems with renewals of your titles, or have any questions about the process, please do not hesitate to contact our customer service team, help@ingenta.com.