Mark Allen publishes academic, professional and consumer titles in healthcare, business, agriculture, finance, music and education. Their readership is global, accessing content via a mix of self-built and third-party platforms. The group\u2019s business-to-business and consumer titles have their own websites, some of which are available to all while others have some form of access management.
\u201cFor these titles we have an access and entitlement system that we built ourselves to OpenID<\/a> standards,\u201d explains Tom Pollard, the group\u2019s publishing director for digital resources.
\u201cThe publishing platforms we use for our academic publications typically have their own integration with OpenAthens. But we are seeing a significant amount of readership crossover. For example, our magazine Gramophone attracts interest from academia as well as music buffs among the general public.
\u201cIn cases like this where readers use personal logins we may also need to add their institutional logins and we may use third-party identity management services to manage things. These services also often have an integration with OpenAthens to enable flexible single sign-on.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
While there are various methods of granting access, from an end user\u2019s perspective it\u2019s pretty seamless. However, the company wanted to simplify their processes to save time and cost. Doing so, they reasoned, could enable single sign-on across the publications to further streamline the customer experience. It would also free up staff time to focus on developing new features that enhance user experience and to create unique, inspiring content.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
Tom says the in-house development team is now making integrations directly with OpenAthens.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n