You’ll be seeing not one, but two of us at next week’s NISO Plus 2025 Global/Online conference. And we’re presenting on two of our favorite topics: Analytics, and Identity & Access.
Michelle Urberg: Standardizing usage reports from aggregators to publishers
Michelle will be joining Dean Smith, the Director of Duke University Press, and Paradigm Publishing CEO Steve Fallon, to talk about the challenges of standardizing usage reports from aggregators to publishers. Anyone who’s worked in book publishing knows that different aggregator platforms appeal to different audiences. Usage analytics are critical inputs for understanding the value that aggregators bring, and to develop an effective distribution strategy.
The challenge for book publishers is that usage is mainly generated through a small number of book distribution platforms, but each platform provides usage stats in a different format. For example, platforms use different titles and ISBNs to refer to the same book; platforms attribute usage to organisations but don’t follow consistent naming conventions; and platforms provide different levels of metadata and usage granularity.
Our industry needs standard usage reporting for publishers. As a first step toward developing concrete publisher-focused reporting standards, LibLynx has been working on delivering book usage analytics for a number of university presses in North America and Europe. Our goal is to build an automated pipeline that enables LibLynx to import these different usage files and generate a single set of reports with usage correctly attributed to titles, the organisations accessing them, and the platforms reporting the usage. Future enhancements will enable publishers to analyse usage in additional ways, such as by subject, author, and funder.
Tim Lloyd: Emerging digital identity infrastructure
Tim will be joining STM’s Chief Information Officer Hylke Koers and identity expert and consultant Heather Flanagan to explore the emerging digital identity infrastructure. This session will share exciting new developments in digital identity infrastructure, review the challenges faced by our existing legacy systems, and discuss initiatives that can adapt to shifting identity standards while maintaining user trust and privacy.
This session will cover several identity and access related initiatives that LibLynx has been intimately involved in over the last few years, such as SeamlessAccess. More recently, Tim has been participating in the working group that developed STM’s latest recommendations for a Researcher Identity Verification Framework (“Trusted Identity in Academic Publishing”). A core recommendation is that editorial platforms introduce user verification as an important process to improve research integrity, including editorial login workflows to support a wider range of authentication methods, such as federated authentication, ORCID, institutional domain checks and other industry trust markers.
We look forward to seeing you online at NISO Plus 2025 Global!