LAW LIS (UK) has been running hot at the latter end of this week with news of price hikes of quite a serious nature from plc..
One librarian writes:
I , too am having issues with renewing our PLC Dispute Resolution Service, and had to query our 30% increase!!
We do have one more user this year, but 30% seemed very excessive.
As on can imagine, with this increase of price and the current financial climate, I’m having to jump through more hoops than usual to get approval for renewal.
My PLC account manager by-passed me and e-mailed my users directly to let them know that the subscription has lapsed and to let her know if they would like to renew it. One legal assistant was more than happy to approve the renewal!! On stopping that in its tracks, still awaiting the necessary Partner approval, I was then told, if I did not let PLC know if we wanted to renew ‘before the close of business on a certain date’ then it would revert to it’s ‘list price’ (fair enough, but even more reason for our Partners to be reticent esp., when it means that the increase is then 50%!)
When queried, I was told that the price we had started on last year,was ‘heavily discounted’ (first we knew about it).
I did try and enquire from PLC customer services, what the ‘List Prices’ are but was told I could only deal with my account manager….
So my query is, does anyone else know of or ever seen the PLC List Price?
This smacks of the techniques used by the major database providers.. try and bypass the gatekeeper (eg librarian or KM manager) and get the lawyers to sign to something that they can’t reverse out of at a later date.
The orginal post by another librarian that started the thread says:
I’m not sure that any of you would be happy to answer this question but here goes………
I am currently looking closely at our PLC subs and feel that the cost of these services, in particular the Property and Corporate services have increased by an unacceptable percentage – we are after all at the start of what could be a long period of recession.
I’m a big fan of PLC but in the current climate when the price of other commodities is either falling, holding or going up by 1 or 2% – a 5% increase on what is already a costly service is hard to swallow.
So.. the question is. How many subscribers will plc lose because of their re-pricing and will those lost subscribers further push renewal prices up for remaining subscribers
