Updating the community

We wanted to thank everyone that has expressed interest in GetFTR.

Over 100 providers of online research services and publishers have been in touch to ask for more detail, and we’ve seen lots of engagement on social media. We’ve even heard directly from several researchers who want to be kept up-to-date on GetFTR’s progress.

We genuinely appreciate the feedback. It’s been a week since we announced GetFTR so it feels like a good time to try and answer the key questions we have received.

We are committed to being open and transparent

We will consult all our stakeholder groups, particularly the organizations that have kindly agreed to be part of our Advisory Group, which includes Silverchair, Atypon and many others.

If the community feels we need to add librarians to our advisory group we will certainly do so and we will explore ways to ensure we engage with as many of our librarian stakeholders as possible. We will hold as many product demonstrations and briefings as we can for everyone (we have already presented at the STM Innovations Seminar in London and the Atypon User Conference).

We are very early in the timeline of GetFTR but wanted to encourage broad participation and feedback as soon as possible, as successful collaboration is fundamental to GetFTR’s development.

Understandably, we have been asked about privacy. There are several key points we can clarify on this: No information that could personally identify a user is passed to GetFTR, and no information about the user’s search terms is revealed.

GetFTR only receives Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and information that uniquely identifies the user’s institution. In addition, GetFTR has no visibility to what links a user clicks on in a discovery service. When clicking on GetFTR links, the user goes directly to the publisher’s website and is redirected to the user’s home institution for authentication.

GetFTR will have rigorous privacy policies on, for example, log retention, to ensure usage data through the entitlement API is not shared.

Link Resolvers

Questions about library link resolvers already providing alternative versions of an article and the impact GetFTR will have on them have also emerged. There is nothing that would prevent discovery services from implementing GetFTR in addition to existing link resolver integrations. However, these are understandable questions and we will consult with librarians and other stakeholders to come up with solutions that address them.

We have, or are planning to, consult with existing library advisory boards that participating publishers have, as this enables us to gather views from a significant number of librarians from all over the globe, at a range of different institutions.

There have also been questions about why this initial group of publishers have developed the solution. Researchers consistently tell publishers that providing a quicker, seamless pathway to access research is an urgent problem.

We felt the quickest way to address this and get the project off the ground was to be agile, get a relatively small number of technology and product experts together from several publishers, and have feedback from an Advisory Group that represent industry stakeholders.

GetFTR is fully committed to supporting third-party aggregators that want to integrate its service. A dedicated Developer Portal is being created to provide guidance and support to those wishing to integrate the solution. Our aim is to ensure GetFTR provides complete flexibility so that it can be successfully adopted by any integrators.

GetFTR’s success now depends on wide adoption, with as many publishers and online research services taking part in its development and integrating the solution as possible. Researchers should have easy, seamless pathways to research, on whatever platform they are using, wherever they are.

We will provide regular updates on this website to address questions the community has and keep everyone informed as GetFTR develops. Thank you for all the interest so far.