Insights Part Three: Collaboration and Innovation: How Publishers Prove Shared Infrastructure Works

As part of GetFTR’s fifth-anniversary celebrations, we sat down with the founding publishers to reflect on five years of progress and change across the research discovery landscape.

An earlier interview in Research Information captured some of their key reflections, but the conversation uncovered many more valuable insights.

As GetFTR’s fifth-anniversary year draws to a close, we wanted to share these additional perspectives in a four-part blog series. Each post explores a key theme shaping the future of research discovery: how GetFTR and its partners are supporting trusted discovery and access, strengthening research integrity, and ensuring that visibility and value travel with the version of record wherever discovery happens.

The Need for Shared Infrastructure

As we know, the scholarly publishing landscape is inherently competitive. Publishers vie for top authors, journal prestige, and researcher attention. Yet, paradoxically, our industry also thrives on cooperation. The success of initiatives like Crossref and COUNTER proves that cross industry collaboration can serve the publishing ecosystem which in turn benefits the whole research community.

When GetFTR launched 5 years ago, the publishers that came together recognized a shared pain point: researchers were frustrated by hitting paywalls when searching for content on discovery platforms even when they were actually entitled to access the content through their institutional subscriptions.

This frustration was a collective problem, and no single publisher had managed to solve it. It therefore required a collaborative effort.

The Importance of Governance in Collaboration

Creating shared infrastructure requires a leap of faith. Competitors must trust one another not just with a good idea, but with its execution and governance. GetFTR navigated these barriers by establishing a clear, community-driven governance model. It operates independently, ensuring a neutral, utility-like service that benefits all participants equally from large global publishers to small society presses, as well as researchers, libraries and discovery services. This model enabled GetFTR to grow from five publishers to an industry-wide initiative, currently covering around 70% of published content and integrated into numerous essential discovery tools and library systems. It is supported by a strategic Steering Committee, an operational product and tech committee and an Advisory Board composed of librarians, publishers, platforms and integrators. From the start, the commitment from the founding members set a new standard for how competitors can cooperate for the greater good of research.

A Model for the Future: Shared Infrastructure is Essential

The success of GetFTR is more than a five-year journey; it’s a template for future innovation in scholarly communications.

As our previous blog posts have emphasized, the scholarly ecosystem is facing unprecedented challenges from the rise of AI in content discovery to the increasing demand for transparency and research integrity. Addressing these industry-wide issues will require shared infrastructure with diverse governance. GetFTR is addressing these challenges in the following ways:

Signposting and Linking directly to the trusted version of record, wherever the article is discovered
Highlighting Retractions and Updates at the point of discovery
Aggregating Usage Data: Developing mechanisms that enable publishers to aggregate content usage across diverse platforms
Provenance Indicators: Providing links to authoritative sources from AI tools (as discussed in our previous blog)
Licensing Clarity: Providing licensing information to ensure researchers know what they’re able to do with the content

Everyone Wins When We Work Together

The story of GetFTR is a testament to what a competitive industry can achieve through collaboration. It shows that by investing in shared infrastructure, mutual benefits arise for everyone involved – researchers get faster, more reliable access; discovery resources and tools offer a better user experience; and publishers ensure their content reaches its intended audience efficiently and reliably.

GetFTR provides a sustainable, scalable, and effective service and collaboration is at the heart of what we do. If you’re not already working with us, we’d love to talk to you about how you and your community can benefit from being part of GetFTR.

Learn how GetFTR can support your discovery service or publishing platform, or contact us to explore new collaboration or integration opportunities.

Next in the series: Looking Ahead: What’s Next for GetFTR and Scholarly Discovery