Oh just when you think it has faded away, the AHA Journal/Ovid debacle rears it's ugly head.

I have been blogging about this problem for well over a year now (Feb 28, 2005, Ovid and LWW Titles).

For over a year, I asked why can't LWW, Ovid, and AHA (three major organizations)get this issue right and stop the confusion.
Ovid, LWW, AHA Journals Saga Continues May 25, 2005
Lippincott, Ovid, and AHA Journals Continued Problems May 24, 2005
AHA Journals, Ovid, LWW, Highwire April 12, 2005
Access LWW and Online Journals...Must We Use Ovid? March 15, 2005

Why is it that there are still rants on MEDLIB today (March 15 2006) regarding access to Circulation?! I was told by my Ovid rep. that libraries can get access to the AHA journals through Highwire, Ovid, or both.

Then why are librarian's complaining that their calls to AHA regarding online access leads them all to the same frustrating point, "Access to the AHA journals must go through Ovid." After a year of dealing with this problem, AHA, Ovid, and LWW can't seem to educate their employees on the situation! Is it gross incompetence and apathy on AHA, Ovid, LWW's part? Or is it money?

I have blogged previously about how I believe Ovid's electronic journal access, subscriptions, and pricing are quite possibly becoming an outdated method of ejournal acquisition and usage (Ovid and Electronic Journals Aug. 23, 2005). I do not buy an electronic journals from Ovid, unless I am forced to because they are LWW titles. My users LOATHE accessing full text articles from Ovid, they would much rather easily browse and use Highwire. Ovid's system is too complex, has too much going on, and is still cumbersome for the average busy doctor to use to browse and print a specific article (not my words, my user's). I must also pay for concurrent user access to Ovid's journals. What an expensive pain the neck. In most cases it is cheaper to pay for online access to a journal hosted on Highwire and get unlimited institutional access rather than pay Ovid a couple hundred dollars for 1 user license.

After all let's be honest. If the journals were available for the same price directly from LWW's website, we wouldn't be getting them from Ovid.

In the past, before Highwire and the explosion of electronic journals on the web, perhaps Ovid's ejournals were the way to go. With the advent of journals now freely (or cheaper than Ovid) available on the web is Ovid stuck holding the handbag to a sub-product that most libraries are weaning away from? I suspect as more and more journals became available online from the publisher's own website or through a third party (Highwire, Ingenta, etc.), librarians began to drop access to the journals through Ovid. I know we did.

While the number of journals online grew, Ovid should have looked at creating a sub-product that provided access and management to those online journals. After all, the people (and librarians) wanted full text access right as they were searching. Had Ovid created a product to access and manage online journals would we have run to products offered by Serials Solutions and Ebsco? Sure, Ovid did finally get on the OpenURL resolver bandwagon with their LinkSolver and Links@Ovid. But that was too little, too late. Instead Ovid is forced to support access to a third party's product (Serials Solutions, Ebsco, etc.) so that libraries can link to their full text collections (which they were previously buying directly from Ovid). Had they created and OpenURL resolver product sooner and it became the dominant product (like Serials Solutions) then would they have moved their LWW titles over? We will never know.