More on BMJ

Well, things are looking up a bit. BMJ have now contacted me and will be coming back with a price for the three month period to the end of this financial year and for London access from April 2005. The price should be with me by the end of this week. Which gives me precisely three weeks to sort something out for continuation of service in January - my last working day is Friday 17th December. Needless to say I made BMJ know that their lack of contact and response to my increasingly vocal emails over the past months was pretty poor.

BMJ - what is going on??

As most of you know, electronic BMJ is effectively free. We've had it included in our general subscription of BMJ journals (a collection of around 25+ journals published by BMJ) although we don't actually "pay" for it. From January 1st, the electronic BMJ will be charged for. At present, we are not precisely sure how much it will cost to provide across London and I'm not getting any response back from BMJ- which is a little frustrating....

We were hoping that a joint deal with Higher Education and the National Core Content would happen to enable continued access to BMJ - and at no extra cost to London - but that seems to have been disbanded due to cost.

As far as I know - from 1st January until 31st March we still should have access to BMJ through our present BMJ Journals subscription - although we may well have to pay something for this access come the new financial year. We have pricing for the BMJ collection but that doesn't include BMJ itself and I have been trying to get someone to commit to a price but am not having much success at present.

We are getting several enquiries into eKAT on what is going on with BMJ, so I thought I would let you know of the current state of play.