Delivering a unified reader and author experience.

Ralph Youngen, American Chemical Society: The user journey has two separate operations: the user goes to one place to read and another to publish. How we got here: From the 1990s user names and passwords were for only a single use. From about 2005 to now we have multi-purpose identities; you can use your university credentials to log in to many sites, which is called “federated access”. Identities are supporting the researcher workflow; however, R&D tools are still single purpose. The journey will be easier if we had federated access for all sites. Privacy concerns: IP address recognition ensures library patron privacy. We will soon see decentralized identities, which are like using a driver’s license for identification. They contain much additional information that is unnecessarily passed on.

Tim Lloyd, Founder of LibLynx said that we have a challenge with current access experiences and benefits, such as with Emerald’s unified access experience. Credentials establish identities; different ones may represent the same person. Now, a single login supports many databases. Removing friction for users is critical.

Keith Webster, Dean of University Libraries, Carnegie Mellon University discussed challenges for authors and the researcher journey. Does the researcher view read and publish as activities in the same workflow? What is the research life cycle around journals? How to interpret transformative agreements: do they have to be discovered by publisher? (For example, a large bookstore in London once shelved books by publisher, not subject, which made it difficult for purchasers.) What is author identity: Compare single sign-on  (SSO) vs. publisher credentials. Most agreements have distinct and quirky business terms. We need to focus on an end to end process. Can we achieve all these activities with SSO? Library questions on transformative agreements: standardization of business terms, how to share with researchers, author verification and approval dashboards; is there a way to give publishers assurances (with SSO), researcher authentication and authorization (IP vs. SSO vs. publisher credentials). A huge advantage of transformative agreements is: they are under your control.

Don Hawkins