From: <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 12:58:24 +0200

Swets' customers ought to be pleased that the insolvency of Swets was
announced before a large part of the advance payments for journal
license and subscription costs for the year 2015 had been transferred
to Swets by the libraries.

Many of our colleagues on this mailing list will remember the shock
wave which hit many libraries when the bankruptcy of RoweCom and its
Faxon Library Services division was made public in 2002/2003:

http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/9017931/rowecom-faxon-collapse-enron-library-world

Faxon had already received a large share of the advance payments from
libraries at that time.

Today we have to ask whether libraries should still pay for a whole
year's subscription to journals in advance at all.  The old reason for
making advance payments is growing less and less convincing with the
decreasing print run of journals. Why should libraries make advance
payments for online-only licenses to access journals for a whole year?
The risk of library payments being lost if an agency goes insolvent
can thus be reduced.

To this end, the joint library community should agree at a global
level to a new payment method which is adjusted to licensing journals
and set this up with the agencies and publishers.  The accounting
departments of the agencies and publishers could then process their
work more evenly over a year, instead of being overloaded at the turn
of the year as has been the case to date.


Greetings

Joachim Meier
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Joachim E. Meier, Dr.-Ing.
Head of Libray
Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) (http://www.ptb.de)
PF 3345                 Tel. +49-531-592-8131
38023 Braunschweig    Fax. +49-531-592-8137
GERMANY                 E-mail: [log in to unmask]
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