6 November 2018
The International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have released their RA21 Corporate Pilot Report, co-funded by Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). The report identifies best practices for adopting a federated identity approach to streamline the user experience for access to subscribed content outside institutional internet protocol (IP) domains.
CCC, along with publishers, libraries, and other interested parties, have been working together since 2016 toward improved user access to subscribed content across a range of content platforms and devices. The corporate pilot, which began in early 2017, included a survey of Pharma Documentation Ring (P-D-R) companies and confirmed the readiness of those companies for a federated identity management system. The five P-D-R companies that participated in the corporate pilot are AbbVie, BASF, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Novartis, and Roche, alongside four publisher participants, ACS, Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley.
The three key goals of the corporate pilot were improved user login experience at the publisher sites, provision for granular usage statistics reporting, and the ability to easily set up and maintain Single Sign-On with multiple publishers. The RA21 corporate pilot successfully exceeded each goal. Next, the pilot will move into its post-project phase of identifying potential parties to operate any necessary centralised infrastructure to support the RA21 user experience.
Final best practice recommendations from RA21 are expected towards the end of 2018. Following that, the standard NISO process for recommended practices will be followed.