Utrecht, one of the pioneers of alternative approaches offer such a tool with their Get Access button. Such tools have had a small take-up but require some maintenance to cope with continued updates to browsers.
A number of libraries (including the OU) have offered tools (typically bookmarklets that plug into a browser) to help users find the right link by rewriting the publisher URL as an ‘ezproxied’ alternative. It’s an approach that has raised some concerns, particularly around privacy implications.įor a while now there have been some other approaches. The publisher-led RA21 initiative is piloting improvements to this experience with some proof-of-concept work to look at ways of making the experience better for users. Feedback from users suggests that users are pretty frustrated even to see the paywall page asking for an amount to view the article and don’t always even realise that there might be a route there to to the article without paying. But users can often struggle to notice the relevant login link on the publishers ‘paywall’ page and then have to tackle the ‘where are you from’ federated access management game. How do libraries get closer to that? There is the federated access approach where users login at the point of access to the resource. If your users aren’t starting their search in the library, but are finding resources via google, or from references, how do they get access to the resource? We’ve seen often enough in almost any of our discovery system testing that what users want is to find the thing they need and straight-away get a link to the PDF. And that approach doesn’t really seem to gel with the multi-device, network-scale, digital world that our users inhabit with their need to access what they need to from wherever they are. But that approach essentially forces users to go through a library gateway that seems to me to replicate the print-based concept of a library, where the user has to be physically present to make use of the resources. But for that approach to work requires library users to be on-campus and/or logged into the campus network or have found their way to (and through) the relevant library system that can give them the direct link to that resource. Often these products will be combined with IP authentication systems (such as EZProxy) to connect directly to library resources. Many academic libraries have invested in web-scale discovery systems such as EBSCO Discovery or Primo (to name just two) and many will have also built lists of library resources for library users, whether in LibGuides or in other bespoke systems.
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