Q. Why are my ILLiad articles being emailed to me?

Article requests through ILLiad may now be processed much faster, depending on where the article was originally published.  The Western Inter-Library Loan (ILL) department will now be utilizing a new service behind the scenes to speed up access, while saving the library money, to articles.

Overview

The benefits of the “Get it Now” service are: 

• Incredibly fast delivery.  During the first year pilot of this program with the Cal State library system and the SUNY system typical delivery to user was accomplished within 10 minutes of placing the Get it Now order.
• Direct delivery to you, via email, of a publisher quality PDF.
• Standardized pricing (which the Libraries are still paying for by the way) that is typically much lower than just the royalty amount for the same article if we got it from another library.
• Monthly invoicing rather than individual credit card purchases which reduces credit card management work
• Nearly seamless integration into the existing ILL workflow via an ILLiad “addon.”
• The service is also very flexible with other potential uses that could benefit users and the library as we gain experience.

Details

“Get it Now” is a one-stop-shopping document delivery service from the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), which serves as a kind of single purchase portal for the following publishers:  Elsevier, Wiley, Wolters Kluwer, ASCO, Nature, Emerald, Cambridge University Press, Springer and Informa Health Care.  And the CCC is continuing to negotiate with other publishers.

Why are we using this service?  Over the last few years as paper subscriptions to journals have been discontinued it has become increasing difficult to fill some requests for recently published journal articles.  Many libraries are unsure of how to interpret licensing restrictions that govern ILL sharing and others don’t want the hassle of vetting every request against a license so they just don’t fill.  Additionally, when we see a list of WorldCat libraries that appear to have electronic access to particular journal there is absolutely no indicator if that access is by subscription or package with the publisher or through an aggregator like EBSCO or JSTOR where embargos on recent content are the norm.

As a result we have increasingly turned to purchasing PDF access based on a number of criteria such as purchase cost vs. royalty amount, how many times we’ve routed a request only to have it unfilled, etc.  These kinds of purchases have typically been made by credit card through a publishers web site.  Each publisher requires a unique account that must be managed and pricing varies considerably – sometimes title by title for a publishers content. 

At this point Get it Now is strictly a behind the scenes tool.