The vendor in question, RoweCom (also known by its former name, Faxon) has been our journal subscription vendor for the past 10 years. Rumors of RoweCom being in “financial difficulty” began circulating on a library listserv just before Christmas. In January, we learned that RoweCom was not paying journal publishers for the 2003 subscriptions that their library customers had paid for last fall. Not long after that, RoweCom declared bankruptcy, charging that its parent company had illegally diverted millions of dollars from its business to cover its own slumping operations.

Just how serious is this situation for our library? In early fall, we renewed subscriptions to approximately 850 journals and newspapers for 2003 through RoweCom, making payments totaling around $213,000. We received in February a spreadsheet from RoweCom, indicating which of our journal publishers had been paid and which had not. The bottom line is that subscriptions to 774 of our journals were not paid by RoweCom, amounting to a loss of $180,000 of the university’s funds.

A very generous but small number of journal publishers, who value their relationship with libraries and understand their plight, have agreed to continue sending out their journals while the future of RoweCom gets settled. Fortunately, it was announced in early March that EBSCO Industries, also a provider of journal subscription services to libraries, had agreed to purchase RoweCom.

While this is indeed good news for us, it is still unknown what will happen to our missing 2003 issues. More than 700 titles are in limbo, including the American Journal of Nursing, The Economist, Nature, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association, and the Washington Post.

If you are looking for a recent issue of a particular journal or newspaper and can’t find it on the current periodical shelves, all is not lost. Many of the missing titles are available electronically in our online full-text databases. Please check with the Reference Desk for any questions you may have about missing issues.