At my school, we used to subscribe to the Science Direct engineering package for our online engineering students. It worked well, but got very little use since most of the engineering classes do not require research. Last year, we were informed that Science Direct was getting rid of the package we were subscribed to and were told that we needed to subscribe to the fancy new College Edition for the physical sciences to keep the journals we currently subscribe to online. Of course this cost more than 1.5 times what we were paying, but it included a whole lot more in the way of content in Chemistry, Physics and Math. Honestly, I wanted to dump Science Direct altogether, since I think it’s not very easy to use and is expensive given our low usage rates, but we decided to go with the College Edition (and probably a good idea because we do need to offer more in the physical sciences, whether they get used or not). Once we were subscribed, I honestly didn’t notice any difference in the interface. It looked exactly the same only said “Science Direct College Edition” instead of just “Science Direct”. The interface was just as unusable.
Part of my job is to create persistent links (with our proxy prefix) to articles that are going to be used in online classes. Two of the articles from an online nursing class were from Nursing Outlook. We have a subscription to Nursing Outlook via Science Direct, so I thought I’d just go and create an article-level link to it. I created a link using the Direct Object Identifier (DOI). Here is an example link: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1067/mno.2000.105248. Unfortunately it did not work. It took us to an Article Locator page which gave me the option of accessing the article from Science Direct or Elsevier Health Science Journals (which we do not have access to). When I click on Science Direct, it takes me to the article abstract, but tells me that I have guest access and will need to pay to access the article. I tried this with and without a proxy prefix (while on-campus) and had the same results. When I called Elsevier tech support 10 days ago, I spent 45 minutes explaining myself and was told that it must be that there is something wrong with our proxy server or that we gave them the wrong IP address (which sounded strange because why would we be able to access these articles by going into Science Direct College Edition directly if our IP address was wrong?). I wouldn’t accept those answers and was then told that they would work on it and get back to me. I ended up sending two e-mails over the next week which I never received responses to. Finally the head of tech services here called our rep who got us an answer… sort of. The person she got to answer us also said it was a proxy server issue. Sigh…
So I called the guy this afternoon who sent the e-mail and again explained the situation. No, it can’t be the proxy server because the link does not have a proxy prefix on it. He finally looked at the DOI and realized that it was not offering Science Direct College Edition as an option in Article Locator — it was taking me to “Science Direct” which we no longer have access to. So what I thought I was linking to that said Science Direct was actually the package we used to have, not what we have now. So I asked, “how can I create an article-level link that will take students to our holdings of the article?” The answer was “you can’t.” He said that there would very soon be better integration between College Edition and Science Direct, but at the moment, there was nothing anyone could do.
Does anyone else think this is insane? Yes, our students can manually go into Science Direct College Edition and find the articles themselves, but they shouldn’t have to, especially when we had the ability to do article-level links when we were paying less. What’s really amazing is how long College Edition has been around and that this seems to be the first time they’ve heard about this problem. Can anyone else with access to Nursing Outlook through Science Direct College Edition try this link and let me know if they can access the article PDF? Just curious.
It’s amazing to me how much we pay for these resources and how little support we get. I even would have been ok with a “I’ll contact _____ department about it and make sure they make this a priority.” “There’s nothing we can do for you” should never be an acceptable response.
Ah, Elsevier. Bless their l i t t l e souls.
emphasis on little. And the worst thing is, our students don’t care (or probably even know) who the vendor is, their impression is “The library website doesn’t work”. We don’t even have Science Direct, and this still makes me want to spit nails–there is NO EXCUSE FOR THIS.
It appears Elsevier has addressed this issue or, rather, has acknowledged that it is a problem. The SDCE page includes this warning in bold:
“We are currently experiencing some technical problems with links that take users from external sites such as PubMed, CrossRef or Google to the full-text article. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this might cause and we are doing our utmost to resolve it.”
It then links to a FAQ in which, pretty much, patience is prescribed.
Cough *monopoly* cough!
Reed Elsevier was one of several publishers investigated by a House of Commons’ Committee a couple of years backin the UK. Not surprisingly, the report was extremely critical… http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3911285.stm
There is nothing wrong with the DOI link, as I can get to the PDF. Want me to send it to you? 😉
But really, you can’t expect something this expensive and obnoxious to actually *work*, can you?
Links to open-access materials in institutional repositories don’t break.
I’m just sayin’.
Hmmm… that wasn\’t there when I originally called Elsevier! Thanks for the info, Dean. It\’s amazing to me that this information is available in an FAQ and yet in the four times I contacted the tech support people, they never mentioned any problems with the resolution of the DOI and it seemed to be the first they had heard of it. Sigh…
Sorry, don’t have the College Edition here, but it links right through for the full version of Science Direct on my campus… I have found that the URL displayed in the browser for Science Direct usually will work as a persistent URL – have you tried the obvious yet? Maybe it’ll work for College Edition too?
Paul, I asked the Tech Support guy about that and he said those links are not durable, but I really should just give them a try. The only problem is, links are really hard to change mid-course once they are put into WebCT so I’d rather give them instructions on how to manually get to the article than give them a link that may not work.
I got it with no problem, but Elsevier is not user friendly.
That sort of cuistomer service is not unusual in my experience. I started computers with 80 hole punch cards and can usually tell a line of bull…. when it happens and too many times hear, “The fault is on your end.” when it clearly is not.
“Dave Pattern Says:
“Reed Elsevier was one of several publishers investigated by a House of Commons’ Committee a couple of years backin the UK.”
When I was in London a few weeks back there were protests on the street about Elsevier outside their offices. You’ve got to be concerned about a publisher that attracts that sort of attention!
We had a similar problem, and in our case, it was having the “.” in the last part of the DOI url that seemed to be the issue in our ereserve system. SD DOIs without any “.” after the final “/” worked.
We ended up using the url included with the citation export, which seemed to match the browser window url. That was 6 weeks ago, and I haven’t checked back to see if the links still work. (nobody has told me that they don’t, though.)
There was quite recently some discussion/complaint of Elsevier’s DOI linking features on one of the link resolver SFX’s user group’s lists recently. Around the same sorts of things you’re talking about–people getting taken to the wrong databases. But from a different direction, since they were talking about SFX generated links.I think it resulted in a slight change to SFX behavior, and possibly a change to Elsevier behavior too (which I wonder if whatever they changed made things worse for you! Their whole external linking architecture seems poorly thought out for the actual environment).
I actually just sort of skimmed the thread and forget the details , but anyway, you aren’t the first to notice problems with their external linking mechanisms.
We don’t use DOI’s for ScienceDirect because of the “Article Locator” (Dislocator?). We *can* get in from the the Elsevier “Article Locator” by clicking on the ScienceDirect option. But I really wish I’d fix their system. It’s *very* broken. They seem to expect that institutions use a cookie-setting URL to the appropriate copy:
http://www.info.sciencedirect.com/implementing/linking/article_locator/
I don’t see why anyone would want to do that.
Instead, like Heather, we’d use the displayed URL:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WNY-45SJBXF-1R&_user=582442&_coverDate=07%2F31%2F2000&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000029699&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=582442&md5=41d3387119e7ce37fc81122cc53a510f
They’re not actually PERMANENT but they seem sufficiently stable for ereserve.
(It’s interesting that if you use their system to “email” the article, they don’t use the DOI, but a citation token.)
I got a free laser pointer from Elsevier at ASIST from a guy who couldn’t tell me boo about the journals he was trying to sell me. (My mom’s cat loves the pointer). Half the bloggers I know give superb customer service/tech support for free.
This comment is actually from Ale de Vries, Product Manager at Science Direct:
“Being the Product Manager at ScienceDirect responsible for linking, I felt compelled by your post to try to explain the background to the College Edition linking problems, and to tell you about what we’re doing to solve them.
The issue with article-level links to College Edition is an unforeseen consequence of a major infrastructure release that we deployed on March 3rd. Basically, two factors contributed to the problem:
– The first one was that of the article locator page popping up. The article locator isn’t new – it’s been around for a very long time, but it only used to present itself for about 200 Elsevier medical and life science journals. A logic consequence of our architectural changes, however, was that the page was presented for pretty much all of our 2,000 journals on ScienceDirect. This created much more confusion than we anticipated – clearly a miscalculation on our part. We have reverted this course of action, and the article locator page is now again appearing only for the original 200 or so journals.
– We also have a software code bug that has been breaking article-level linking from PubMed and CrossRef for College Edition customers for some time now. We have a solution for this, but we need to prepare it, test it to make sure it works, and then deploy it. I’d love to be able to make a promise about when we will able to implement this fix, but fact is that it might take a few weeks. As soon as we have a fixed date, we’ll make sure that our College Edition customers get informed about it. After the fix, seamless linking to the full-text of subscribed journals in your College Edition collections will work without a hitch.
Due to the complexity and scale of ScienceDirect, it took us some time to identify all issues surrounding this problem and come up with a good game plan – but that doesn’t justify the mixed – and at times clearly wrong – messages you and others have been getting from our support organization and from our sales reps. Even as we were still investigating the issues, we could at least have made sure that you got a consistent and correct answer from us. We didn’t do that, and I apologize for it.
Please continue to blog and vent your opinion about what we’re doing. Although a bit painful at times, it is very valuable to us.”