Journal Supply Chain Efficiency Improvement Pilot (JSCEIP)

Pilot Participants

British Library

The British Library is the national Library of the United Kingdom. It provides world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world’s largest and most comprehensive research collection. Further information is available on the Library’s website at www.bl.uk.

Ruth Jones, Head of Product Development at the British Library, said

"This should ensure that in the future legitimate access to these archives is made simple and transparent." Ringgold have been working with publishers for over 3 years to create a database of institutions and their metadata which will form a key basis of the pilot.

HighWire Press

HighWire Press, a division of the Stanford University Libraries, is a not-for-profit electronic journal developing and hosting service, producing the definitive online versions of high-impact, peer-reviewed journals and other scholarly content. In its 10 years of operation, HighWire has partnered with a community of influential societies, university presses and other scholarly publishers to create a vast database of the some of the finest, fully searchable research, medical and social science literature available on the Internet. Visit HighWire Press at www.highwire.org.

Richard Gedye of OUP Journals and Chair of COUNTER said,

"Our customer support staff spend the beginning of every year trying to make sure that customers have access to the content they have paid for and that renewals are correctly identified (not as cancellations and new orders). We are hoping that this project will enable customers to get more complete and consistent usage statistics. Publishers will also benefit from increased knowledge of their user base and be able to identify new opportunities."

Greg Malar of Rockefeller University Press and chair of ICEDIS added,

"We spend a lot of time trying to make sure that the correct information is transmitted between publishers and agents and a standard customer identifier, which is part of these transactions, should reduce the lack of precision and therefore confusion."

Swets Information Services

Swets is the world’s leading subscription services company, connecting the supply and demand chain that exists between publishers and institutions, libraries and information centers. The company provides services for customers from academic, government, corporate and medical institutions. Swets has been operating successfully for over 100 years.

The company has offices in over 20 countries, servicing clients and publishers from over 160 nations. Those offices manage more than 1.8 million subscriptions, with half of those related to electronic subscriptions, between some 65,000 publishers and over 60,000 clients, including one in three Fortune 500 companies. Swets is the only subscription agent to be ISO 9001:2000 certified on a global basis, which serves as a significant endorsement of its ability to provide clients and publishers with the kind of speedy, reliable and efficient service methods they expect to receive from an intermediary. www.swets.com.

"As an intermediary that manages 1.8million subscriptions, Swets is well experienced in handling the intrinsic complexities involved in connecting the supply of and demand for information. Swets is delighted to be participating in this exciting Pilot as we are constantly searching for ways to make the flow of information as efficient and transparent as possible,"

said Arie Jongejan, CEO of Swets Information Services.

Ringgold Inc.

Ringgold provides sales and marketing support for suppliers and publishers, helping them define products and services, fitted to the working environments of potential buyers. It was formed in 2005 from the merger of Information Power Ltd based in Oxford, UK OpenRFP based in Portland, USA and Biblio Tech based in Bristol, UK. Ringgold has been working with academic publishers since 2002 to create a database of customers with standard metadata including demographics for marketing purposes. As of May, 2007 the database contains more than 70,000 formal names of institutions with associated metadata, all of which is being used as the basis for Pilot project data. Information about Ringgold can be found at www.ringgold.com.