BMS Renewal

[treecreeper]

I've just received an email asking me to renew membership of British Mycological Society for 2011. The cost of Associate membership plus Field Mycology is £51.50, compared with £43 last year. No justification is offered for this 20% hike.

Goodbye BMS from this punter

[thunder]

Originally Posted by treecreeper

I've just received an email asking me to renew membership of British Mycological Society for 2011. The cost of Associate membership plus Field Mycology is £51.50, compared with £43 last year. No justification is offered for this 20% hike.

Goodbye BMS from this punter

Well, you could always ask them the reason before going off in a huff. When was the last price rise? Nothing much gets cheaper in this world, I'm afraid.

henrya

[FungiJohn]

I pay £92 for my IOSH membership, and although useful it’s not as interesting!

John

[treecreeper]

Originally Posted by thunder

Well, you could always ask them the reason before going off in a huff.

The onus is on them to say why they need all this extra money, not on me to enquire.

This is a justified huff .

Grumble. mutter. grumble.

[thunder]

Originally Posted by treecreeper

The onus is on them to say why they need all this extra money, not on me to enquire.

This is a justified huff .

Grumble. mutter. grumble.

Maybe, maybe not, but since it's so easy to send them an email asking the reasons for the increase, I wonder why you don't do it.

And when was the last increase?

Perhaps your huffostat is set too low?

henrya

[BROCSMAN]

I have sent them an e-mail asking about it. If I get a useful reply I'll post it here.

[Paul mabbott]

Originally Posted by treecreeper

The onus is on them to say why they need all this extra money, not on me to enquire.

This is a justified huff .

Grumble. mutter. grumble.

If you look back through the paperwork you'll probably find that the previous AGM agreed the increase a year or so back. That's how things are done - many of us frget that it has happened or don't read the paperwork.

[BROCSMAN]

For information.

This is the reply I got today from Lynne Boddy:


"Membership fees have increased by 5%, as have costs for most journals. The costs of Fungal Biology Reviews and Field Mycology have increased by more,as they were very heavily subsidised in the past. This is explained in the final 2010 issue of Mygology News which should be out soon. A draft of it is attached by way of explanation:


Membership subscriptions and Journal price to members 2011
Council, at its meeting in June 2010, agreed to the cost of subscription and journals for 2011 indicated in the table below. These prices mostly represent a 5% increase on last year. Elsevier will be charging the Society 5% more for all of the BMS journals, and this cost is being passed on to members directly. Member’s copies of Fungal Biology Reviews and Field Mycology have been considerably subsidised since their inception. The Society really cannot afford to do this forever and so the cost of these journals will rise by rather more than the other journals until the Society is charging the membership what it actually has to pay the publishers for these journals. Council believes that these prices represent excellent value for money, not least with electronic access to all of the journals for £26.50, and membership fees considerably lower than other equivalent societies."


Speaking personally I'm OK with that.

[Paul mabbott]

It could be worse, if you were an entomologist, for instance:
Subscriptions | Royal Entomological Society
That's without any journals.
The journals cost around £90 per annum - £92 for Ecological Entomology for instance.

The electronic journals subscription sounds good!

[mollisia]

Originally Posted by treecreeper

I've just received an email asking me to renew membership of British Mycological Society for 2011. The cost of Associate membership plus Field Mycology is £51.50, compared with £43 last year. No justification is offered for this 20% hike.

Goodbye BMS from this punter

Hello,

I don't know what the habits are in Britain, but in Germany raisings of membership fees have to be voted by the annual members meeting.
We have a similar kind of trouble at the moment because of raising of the fees. Several memebrs do protest, because they see a lot of possiblities to safe money, before raising the fees, but the raising has been accepted by the members meeting, so what. The members meeting saw only appr. 60 of 1200 members, and they voted appr. 35:25, so a minority of 3% of the members gave the placet for the raising of the fees. But what can a society do? They cannot force the members to the annual meeting. The ones who complain could have been there and vote too .....

best regards,
Andreas