What attracts clients to use your ILL service in a global market?

The paper will focus on a traditional interlibrary loan policy versus a set of alternative approaches. The result of applying the new methods has proved to provide the end user with the requested information more quickly - and in many cases also at a lower price. At CERN, the Interlibrary Loan Service more and more frequently purchases books via online bookshops, either as hard copies or as e-books, in place of borrowing these book from expensive document delivery services abroad. For articles it is even more evident that new approaches speed up the operation and cut costs. However, the providers selling articles on the net do not so far contribute to a cost reduction as they still seem to be relying on the justification of making a high profit delivering the information 'just in time'. In some branches of science, however, the situation is quite different as electronic preprints have been a part of the scientific culture for more than ten years. This trend is now spreading into many more fields and allows librarians today to give up ordering articles via the traditional channels, and instead instantaneously propose free preprints or self archived versions of the requested papers to their clients. Taking advantage of the free versions available on the net will not only reduce costs and save time for the end user, but it will also be an important signal to the scientific community that librarians are ready to support the migration from the present system of scientific publishing to a toll-free access to scientific information.