Friday, July 4, 2008

Wiley InterScience swallowing Blackwell Journals Online (Synergy)

The Wiley merge of Blackwell Journals hasn't been as smooth as hoped. The database search appears be working and X Search returns the same number of hits for both Wiley and Synergy, and the A-Z list of databases both point to the same page (Wiley have arranged for all traffic to the old Synergy address to go to their site but I'm not sure if this due to a redirect or a DNS change).

The issues we are having are with our link resolver (Find It). There has been a lot of discussion the SFX listserv about users accessing the Synergy titles being sent to either the Wiley home page or to the journal's home page on Wiley.

Below is some information on the problem, it's ETA for resolution, and some stats on how the Wiley servers is coping with the additional journals (JCU had around 900 Blackwell titles and Synergy was a second most accessed ejournal publisher in the first five months of 2008 (Wiley is seventh))

Dear all - Here is an update on some of the issues raised today about the Wiley InterScience transition:

Downtime - The site went down and was unavailable for a short time this afternoon and last night, UK time. We have now identified the same cause of both these periods of downtime and are therefore able to fix it to prevent it occurring for this reason again.

Access to subscribed journals - if you find that your access to particular titles is not set up, such as for non-Collection titles, then please submit your request via our Customer Services site as I suggested:
http://www.interscience.wiley.com/support. This serves two purposes; 1) it will get your problem fixed and your access set up as you need it, and 2) it will enable our engineers to judge whether there is truly a pattern in the types of requests we're getting and therefore will help them to find a generic fix if there is.

OpenURL linking - we are working on this so that OpenURL / SFX links to Blackwell Synergy pages are redirected to the nearest equivalent page on Wiley InterScience rather than the homepage as is happening now. The fix may take a few days so apologies for this. Links to the Blackwell Synergy URLs which are constructed like so
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/loi/jan are working.

Athens - we are working to resolve this so that authentication works for all journals. It currently seems to work for some journals and not others.

Google Scholar - Lesley Crawshaw pointed out that yesterday Google Scholar search results weren't resolving to articles on Wiley InterScience for Blackwell journals. This was because yesterday Google chose not to search the site. We are checking that they are now indexing the site as promised.

DOIs - Colin MacLean raised the issue of DOI links not resolving to the appropriate article. We think this is because the article hasn't yet been loaded onto Wiley InterScience. As I mentioned, there is still some content which we are working through to upload and this can be found on our transition site:
http://www.interscience.wiley.com/transition

Site activity - Just for your information I wanted to give you some feedback about initial activity on Wiley InterScience now that we've had one day with the added 1.6 million Blackwell articles. Since yesterday the response times have improved with 99% of pages being served in less than 2 seconds, usage is up 77% over the same period last week, and content delivered to customers is up 60% over last week, alongside the 43% increase in content on the site. Once we have resolved these final access, linking and content issues, we will of course expect this to rise still further.

If there are any other errors you'd like to report then please submit them via our Customer Services site as that way we can monitor them, report on them, fix them, and respond directly to you about them.

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