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Simon Inger is a co-presenter at the forthcoming UKSG course on Licensing and Negotiation Skills for Librarians.
Simon Inger has unparalleled experience in e-journal platform selection, having been a leading service provider in the field with CatchWord until 2001 and has subsequently kept well abreast with each of the major vendors' platforms, their advances, their limitations and their reputations with clients, librarians and researchers. Please note that Simon Inger has absolutely no affiliations or interests to declare with any journal platform supplier!
SIC appreciates that there is more to journal platform selection than features and price. The selection process needs to take into account:
| Stakeholders | Often for commercial publishers the stakeholder situation is relatively straightforward, but becomes much more complicated for societies or for commercial publishers working with societies. Often key society board members have other priorities in selecting a journal platform provider. |
| Community | Some platform providers play to a subject community. While this may be of significant benefit to a publisher with a good community "fit", to what extent is it a negative factor for a community "outsider"? |
| Librarians | How the platform provider works with librarians (or facilitates your working with librarians) is of critical importance to online success. |
| Reputation | Simon Inger is very familiar with the service reputations of the various platform providers, whether that be service reliability, ease of use by librarians and end users, new feature development process, customer service and account management. |
| Support | Support doesn't just mean how well the supplier will support your clients, or even how well they support you in technical matters, but more importantly it is a consideration of how much business support and leadership the supplier provides in the market. Some publishers need their supplier to be their "eyes and ears" in the market, not only keeping abreast of technology, but also making recommendations about how to package their e-journals and sell them. Others find such an approach overbearing. Simon Inger's wealth of experience in this area will help match your needs to the various suppliers' strengths. |
| Market Reach | To what extent can the platform provider assist you in getting into new markets by raising your visibility? Why is this so radically different from provider to provider? |
See also Systems Selection