*sigh*

[andrewducker]

Someone on my friends list just link to New Scientist.  So I followed the link, to be told that I'd seen my 3 permitted articles.  Which is odd, as I don't actually go to New Scientist very often.

They seem to be working this out by IP address, which is a little frustrating, as I share an outgoing IP address with all the people behind the proxy server here (about 5,000 of us).  I'm not sure those 3 pages are going to go very far...

Comments

[andrewducker]

So I tried to log in (guessing my username - I hate sites that use user name rather than email address), and failed. So I tried to register, and the registration page just hung.

Oh well.

[drplokta]

It's by cookie -- just clear your newscientist.com cookies and you'll be fine. Or at least, that works for me.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

There's a simple workaround. The article pages keep loading after all the text and images are up, and the last thing it loads is the thing that blanks out the page. I stop the page loading before it hits that, and read everything w/o problem. It works everytime.

[randomchris.livejournal.com]

Similar workaround - as soon as all the test has loaded, hit ctrl-A and ctrl-C. You can then pop it into a Notepad file and read the page happily.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I wouldn't necessarily mind if it was just random, but I hate it when the error message specifically accuses me of doing something stupid.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, the joys of electronic journal access. This is the sort of problem ninox has to deal with on a daily basis. Only with publishers there isn't a nice helpline you can ring. A response to a complaint such as "I can't access the journals I have paid for" can take a month or more to get even a basic acknowlegement. Or so I am told.

[akicif.livejournal.com]

Tell me about it... I work in access management, and I would really like it if just the once, both parties to a problem would actually communicate - almost every time we get a support call from a university or college, it can be the devil's own job getting logs out of the publisher or vice versa.

I think part of the problem is that access management falls between library and IT staff on the academic side and between IT and marketing on the publishers' side and it's comparatively rare for folk on one side of either of those divides to speak the language of their colleagues on the other.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

It is made worse because most journals are purchased through an agent. The publishers then refuse to deal directly with the library staff, even on technical issues. All communication then has to go through a third party, who is often only contactable by Email. The thing that gets me is not that this situation has arisen, but that it has existed for a long time, and nobody seems to be doing anything to resolve it.

[matgb]

Heh, it's bad enough in this house with just SB and me, although it's mostly the FT I get blocked from.