ANALYSIS AND NEWS
we all need less friction in our lives. An equally obvious benefit to publishers flows from this – greater usage, fewer turnaways and higher renewals – because all those users who were abandoning their search for content (and I’m sorry, but it does happen, especially on mobile) are no longer doing so. Build a better infrastructure and your usage improves. All our analytics support the slightly hoary cliché – if you build it, they will come. A perhaps less immediately apparent benefit it gives publishers is the ability to build a relationship with the individual user, in a way that they couldn’t do before. And then, in the particular case of SAMS Sigma, there is the wealth of analytical data publishers and their institutional customers benefit from, providing actionable insights in identifying relationships between users and content.
This new frictionless access process must not be purchased at the cost of decreased security. The security protocol we have used in building SAMS Sigma, OpenID Connect, is used by Google and many others and represents the flagship standard in online security. Security permeates the entire design of SAMS Sigma, and is not something added as an additional layer on the top.
Keeping the complications in the background
It could be objected that the access situation is inherently more difficult in the case of publisher content, and this is why publishers have been slow to move towards single sign-on. It is not simply a case of connecting a user with a content provider, as in the consumer context – there are also potentially multiple institutional identities to factor in. The publisher sells subscription content to a librarian, who
‘This frictionless type of access management is available with existing technology’
provides access to content under multiple subscriptions for researchers and students, who log in to that content via an access system provided by the publisher. However, though this might have been a drawback in the past, the technology building blocks to make the connection happen seamlessly in the background are now in place. We are living in a world of open APIs, shared stacks and cloud computing. Integration is king.
It is simply not necessary to expose users to the complications of the situation going on in the background when they make a connection to subscription content, and the benefits for all concerned of taking the friction out of this are surely worth the candle.
Embracing a more user-centric vision Ultimately, single sign-on represents a more customer-centred, a more user-centric view of access management. The user always owns his or her, own identity.
It is perhaps the necessity of making this shift in perception that has held publishers back from embracing a vision of single sign-on. The world is changing, and user expectations have changed too. Scholarly communication is a very special field of human endeavour, but it cannot afford to isolate itself too much from the mainstream of how information is discovered, accessed and used.
Neither can we safely assume that scholars enjoy a little difficulty – that they are energised by having barriers placed in their way. There are plenty of new, born-on-the web competitors and start-ups ready and willing to disrupt those who fall into such cozy assumptions.
Believing passionately that engaged scholarship lies at the heart of any healthy society
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Ad.indd 1 18/09/2015 13:08
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