Medlibs Needs RA21 on Their RADAR

I attended remotely, the RA21 webinar Friday morning and it was interesting.  I hope they recorded it and will make the recording available for everyone because this needs to be on the radar of medical and hospital librarians…now. Those attending MLA in Atlanta there will be session Sunday 4-4:20 Leading Easy Access to Content: RA21 Pilots Transform Researcher Productivity and Privacy in the Hyatt Regency Embassy C. Why? The publishers are looking to do away with the current method of online resource authentication, IP validation.  There is a whole slew of reasons as to why IP validation has problems, one of the biggest is piracy like SciHub. What is RA21? The RA21 website goes into further details, but it is basically an initiative to facilitate seamless access to online resources while preventing piracy and improving authentication methods. This is big, because right now many hospital and medical libraries use IP validation, EZ Proxy or both to authenticate users.  RA21 seeks to eliminate IP validation from your on campus IPs as well as your EZ Proxy. I don’t understand all of the technical nuts and bolts to RA21 but here is what I learned from the webinar and why hospital librarians need start paying attention. Publishers are pushing to eliminate IP validation and the method for authentication.  This means you won’t be able to give your hospital’s IP ranges or your proxy server and have your patrons automatically access library resources (witho...
Source: The Krafty Librarian - Category: Databases & Libraries Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs