LibLynx & PSI partner on real-time Open Access Usage Reporting

We’re very excited to share the news that we’re partnering with PSI, the company behind theIPregistry.org, to deliver real time usage metrics to organisations wanting to understand who is accessing their Open Access (OA) content.

Our unique offering combines:

• PSI’s repository of 60k+ verified IP addresses for content licensing organisations worldwide; plus
• LibLynx’s on-demand and real-time COUNTER reporting solution

Why Open Access?

OA publishing is a growing trend, driven by a variety of factors such as changing funder mandates (‘Plan S’); the challenge of growing subscriptions in an environment of stagnant library budgets, illegal aggregators (SciHub etc), and institutional pushback against ‘Big Deals’; and a growing ecosystem of tools to support OA publishing. A study published in Feb 2018¹ estimated that at least 28% of the scholarly literature was OA – a proportion that’s only increased since.

Traditional tools for understanding organizational usage leverage the information that publishers gather as subscribers authenticate to access paywalled content – IP addresses that can be matched to customer lists, referring URLs, registered credentials etc. None of which helps when your content is publicly available and doesn’t require any form of registration or authentication.

Which leaves publishers with OA content rather in the dark … at a time when it’s becoming increasingly crucial for OA publishers to know who is reading their content and where that readership is based, especially when developing new transformative deals and providing metrics to funders.

We hate seeing a good use case go to waste!

Why partner?

It turns out that you need a couple of crucial ingredients to deliver effective usage reporting of OA content.

First, you need a means of tracking and reporting usage in real-time that’s easy for publishers to integrate and flexible enough to accommodate differing needs, such as larger publishers who simply want rich, structured data to do their own analysis vs smaller publishers who value a reporting layer on top of the data. We’ve got this covered with the infrastructure already in place for our COUNTER reporting solution.

Second, you need an authoritative database of organizational IP addresses that you can use to identify the source of incoming traffic. Which is where PSI come in, as they have developed two valuable tools for identifying organizational usage: theIPregistry.org (a verified, global list of over 60k content licensing organisations) and IP-intrusion.org (a community liaison hub to identify sources of cyber-crime).

What Open Access reporting will be available?

We will provide OA usage reports covering the following area:

• Title Report – usage of each title, broken down by organisation and event type e.g. investigation, request
• Institution Report – usage by each organisation, broken down by title and event type
• Intrusion Report – usage of titles, broken down by source as flagged in the IP-Intrusion database
• Country Report – usage broken down by country and/or region
• Organisation Type Report – usage broken down by organisation type e.g. academic, hospital, government

As with our existing COUNTER reporting functionality, reports will be accessible online or downloaded from any existing website by embedding the LibLynx reporting widget. Alternatively, reports can be delivered as a data feed for ingestion into a third party analytics tool.

Ready to learn more?

Whether you’re a dedicated OA publisher or publishing OA content alongside traditional paywalled publications, we’re ready to help you understand who’s accessing your OA content.

Please contact us today to learn more.

About LibLynx: LibLynx provides flexible Identity, Access Management, and Analytics solutions to online resource providers and libraries. We make identity & access as simple as possible and as secure as necessary, and deliver insightful analytics that are on-demand and in real time. We mitigate the risks of fraud and managing personal data. Our cloud native applications are technology and platform independent, with an architecture designed to simplify integration and facilitate customization.

About PSI: PSI is the developer of both theIPregistry.org and IP-intrusion.org. PSI is an independent company. Through our work to enable publishers, membership societies, and libraries to work together securely and confidentially towards common goals, PSI has found itself in a unique position to encourage collaboration, communication and innovation across the academic research community.
TheIPregistry.org is a single repository of the verified IP addresses for over 60,000 content licensing organisations worldwide. TheIPregistry.org is accessible to both libraries and publishers and is the only registry that checks and verifies IP addresses to eliminate the errors that commonly occur. IP-intrusion.org is a community liaison hub where publishers and libraries can exchange information and warn each other about threats.

¹ See The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles