Serials Solutions Freezes Prices

With public and academic library budgets cut to the quick nationwide while prices for journals and other items continue to rise, many of those facilities are finding it difficult to meet current costs as well as plan for future spending. Serials Solutions is the first vendor to provide some relief: the company has announced a price freeze that will last through January 1, 2004. The company has vowed that the "price schedule will not increase for its A–Z title list reports, full MARC records for e-journals, and OpenURL link resolver, Article Linker." On top of the price freeze, Serials Solutions is offering community and junior colleges an additional 25 percent discount "on all services" and is dropping the $150 charge for hosted reports.

Announcing the move, Chris Pierard, company cofounder and director of sales, said that in recent months he has heard librarians continually raise concerns about how product costs are rising while budgets are dropping. The company wanted to do its part to "help libraries keep all of their services up and running during these difficult times," said Pierard.

Pierard added that the company was founded by librarians, so there is "a unique kinship with libraries, and [we] have always professed ourselves to be advocates for libraries. In the hard times it would be hypocritical if we didn't make sacrifices to help ease their sacrifices," he said. Pierard argues that many other library companies are "claiming that they're keeping their price increases to the industry standard of eight to ten percent, and they make this sound like they're doing libraries a favor. Do you think library budgets are going up next year by eight or ten percent? No way."