Reporting to multiple identities: an update from our consultation

Our consultation on reporting usage for users with multiple institutional identities has wrapped up. There was a clear direction of travel in the responses that we received, but not unanimous agreement.

Based on the overall feedback, we’re looking at creating a best practice guide in which we offer a recommendation plus a fallback postion.

• Publishers should report usage by a user with multiple institutional identities to all of the institutions, even if one or more doesn’t hold a license for the content. This is in line with option one from our consultation.
• The fallback position will be for platforms to restrict users to a single institutional identity during a session. That means usage will only ever be reported for one institution at a time. As a side effect, the fallback might mean users being denied access to content they’re entitled to see.

This reflects current practices in place across our publisher and technology provider respondents, as well as most – though not all – library respondent preferences. We know some libraries would prefer for usage to only be reported to licensed institutions. Unfortunately that creates a lot of technical complexity. Our recommendation therefore primarily came down to technical simplicity and reporting clarity.

Next steps

Tasha is going to work up a best practice guide for the Executive Committee to review in their April meeting. Once Exec signs off the guide, it’ll appear on the Best Practice page.