Consultation: Reporting to Multiple Institutional Identities

We have been working for a while on a project to standardise and streamline how publishers manage usage reporting where a single user can be tied to lots of institutional identities. Today, we’re opening up our discussions to the community to gather their views.

The challenge

Publishers offer many different authentication methods to end users. This is great in terms of allowing a user to access content seamlessly, but having lots of ways to authenticate means a single user could be linked to lots of institutions at the same time. For example, Sam may be affiliated with institution A through IP recognition, institution B through Shibboleth / Open Athens authentication, and Institution C through role-based access (i.e. a personal log-in for an editor). 

Some publisher platforms only allow users to have one institutional identity at a time, but that isn’t the case everywhere. A lot of usage is happening on platforms that allow users to link themselves to multiple institutions in a single session. There are lots of benefits to that, specifically around getting access to more content.

We identified a series of ways that publishers could manage usage reporting where users are linked to multiple institutional identities. In this consultation, we want to understand which options are best for both libraries and publishers.

Have your say

We want to make sure that the process for reporting to multiple identities works for as many people as possible, so we really want to hear from you. Whether you are a technology provider, a publisher, a librarian or a consortium manager, please send us your feedback!

COUNTER members are also eligible to sign up for the series of webinars we’ll be running in January on all three of our best practice consultations – this one, one on pathways to compliance for small, COUNTER non-compliant publishers, and of course one on reporting generative and agentic AI usage.