Hi all.

I’ve posted this on the erm-team Slack channel as well, so if you are on there you may have already seen it.
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Sorry I wasn’t around for the call on Wednesday, but having chatted to Gill and had a look at the feedback I’m thinking we need to dive into the concept of the “Subscription” and try to work out all the different things that we might mean by ‘subscription’

I think the origins of ‘subscription’ are about the notion of regular payments made, to receive content - in my mind this original meaning links ‘subscription’ very much to the financial arrangement and time periods
Thinking about this in the context of ERM and how the word is used, I’m seeing three parts to this at the moment:

* The idea of a 5 year agreement for the Freedom collection being a ‘Subscription’ in that at the end of the 5 year period you expect to negotiate a new deal with the same vendor for substantially the same content
* The idea of a 5 year agreement for the Freedom collection being a ‘Subscription’ in that there are annual payments made over the course of the deal, and potentially the option to terminate the agreement early
* The idea of a set of journals which are the ‘subscriptions’ in that this subset of content (often as part of a larger set of content you get as a result of your subscriptions) is what your payment is set against

It feels like all these things are sometimes referred to as ‘subscriptions’.

As a starting point - is this summary a good one - does it make sense, and do people agree that these are overlapping uses of ‘subscription’. If not, what is wrong here?
Also are there other aspects of ‘subscription’ that I’ve missed

Basically - what are all the different things we can mean when we talk about ‘subscriptions’  - then we can start working out how we need to represent them in ERM

Owen