21st July 2022

It’s been a busy few months at GetFTR, commissioning user research to test new concepts, running our highest attended publisher webinar, participating at other events, and onboarding new partners. Please read on to find out more.

GetFTR well positioned to solve researcher problems

In January 2022, GetFTR commissioned Clearleft to conduct an independent study with the following goals:

  • Re-validate the current GetFTR value proposition, to ensure it meets the needs of researchers, discovery services and other stakeholders
  • Test the concept of delivering the GetFTR service through a browser extension
  • Explore the value of providing an alternative version, where user’s institution doesn’t provide access to the full text version of record

Clearleft identified that GetFTR is well positioned to solve the problem that researchers have today, which is the disconnect between the point of discovery and access to scholarly content. You can read the summary here.

Engaging with the community

Last month we ran the latest in our series of webinars to look at how publisher and discovery services are utilising GetFTR to streamline access to content for researchers. We were joined by guest speakers:

  • Laird Barrett, Group Product Manager at Springer Nature, who spoke about how publishers are integrating with GetFTR on article references
  • Jud Dunham, Senior Director of Product Management at Elsevier, who provided an update on the content hosting pilot and how GetFTR is being used to check entitlements
  • Nancy Sommers, Senior Product Owner at CAS Scifindern, who gave the discovery service perspective and shared some data on uplift

During the webinar, we reviewed some early findings from CAS SciFindern to illustrate how GetFTR has added value. CAS SciFindern users are already using GetFTR links, with 1,000 articles accessed via GetFTR on day 1, increasing to 104,000 in the first week of May. CAS Scifindern’s senior product owner, Nancy Sommers, commented that GetFTR links always lead their users to the full text article, streamlining the access process, and removing the manual work that librarians do today for other linking solutions. GetFTR links can be found on Reference Detail, Reaction Detail, and Full Text pages in CAS SciFindern.

If you missed the session you can catch up here to find out more about our plans.

NASIG Library Conference Presentations

Librarians, publishers and vendors gathered in Baltimore, Maryland, for the first in person for the NASIG conference since 2019. Two sessions touched upon GetFTR:

  • Access and Assessment: Delivering Privacy Preserving Services, June 7, 2022
  • Leveraging Federated Authentication to Simplify Remote Resource Access During the Covid 19 Pandemic, June 5, 2022

The former session detailed the many privacy preserving mechanisms built into services such as COUNTER, GetFTR, and SeamlessAccess to help libraries understand the impact on their patrons. The latter detailed the pandemic’s effects on the shift from IP access to Federated Authentication, as well as a warning about the coming browser changes that may break library access to online content. There were many thoughtful questions and attendees generated ideas for future industry participation.

New participants

We welcome Dovepress, with several other publishers joining soon. Publishers are starting to think about how to integrate with GetFTR, joining ScienceDirect with providing streamlined access to article references. GetFTR is increasing its scope of open content, providing links to articles in fully open journals.

What’s next?

We continue to develop GetFTR so that it best suits the needs of the community. We are exploring some new concepts and partnership opportunities to expand our offering – more on this in the next newsletter.

If you are interested in partnering with us and would like to hear more about our plans to grow the number of pathways to authoritative research, please contact Dianne.