29 October 2020
OpenAthens has announced that HathiTrust has joined the OpenAthens Federation.
The OpenAthens Federation is the only one in the world that enables participation from any country or sector. Hosted in multiple global regions, the federation’s 2,600 members have access to a range of academic journals and e-books in a variety of subject areas.
Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit organisation. The company collaboratively works with 200+ academic and research libraries, preserving 17.4 million digitised publications. The company’s services offer reading access to the fullest extent allowable by US copyright law and computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research.
Since its inception, HathiTrust has addressed large scale challenges that libraries collectively face and provided solutions by working closely with its members. HathiTrust manages programmes to find and open public domain materials, to expand access to US federal publications, and to develop services that support advanced computational research.
Joining the OpenAthens Federation enables more academic libraries to access HathiTrust’s services. Identity and access management issues can be barriers for some libraries. However, the OpenAthens Federation will enable more academic communities the opportunity to join HathiTrust and access its digital library stewarded by the academic library community.
When asked about OpenAthens, executive director at HathiTrust, Mike Furlough said: “Our membership in the OpenAthens Federation has the potential to open research paths for new communities of students and researchers. We are delighted to become part of a service that is so well respected within the industry.”
Jon Bentley, commercial director at OpenAthens, commented: “Like OpenAthens, HathiTrust is a member-driven organisation and puts its 200+ academic and research library members first. We are delighted to welcome HathiTrust to our Federation. We look forward to supporting their work with academic and research libraries.”
To find out more about OpenAthens Federation, please visit: https://openathens.org/publishers/federation/