Harnessing API technology for entitlement checking and streamlined access to scholarly content

GetFTR (Get Full Text Research) is a backend API service developed by five scholarly publishers: American Chemical Society, Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley in 2019.

Working collaboratively to address one of the largest researcher pain points, these publishers are collaborating on backend API development under the name GetFTR (Get Full Text Research), to streamline access to scholarly content from today’s wide array of discovery and collaboration services that are commonly used in the scientific research process, such as:

1. Research Discovery Services, e.g. PubMed, Web of Science, Dimensions, SciFinder, Scopus etc.
2. Library Discovery Systems, e.g. Primo, Alma, etc.
3. Scholarly collaboration networks (SCNs), e.g. Mendeley, ResearchGate etc. 

When interacting with these services, researchers are often looking to find scholarly content relevant to their own research or that’s important for their collaboration with colleagues. However, finding and accessing such content is not always as easy as one might think. Some of the issues researchers have today, which GetFTR addresses, include:

1. Time consuming authentication and access journeys to scholarly content
2. A multitude of link options, suggesting access to full text but unclear upfront if that link will actually give them access
3. Confusing access solutions while researcher is off campus
4. Fully entitled users turning to pirated or outdated content, affecting the integrity of research, and negatively impacting article usage data, which is important for both publishers and librarians

To address this, the GetFTR API was developed with the goal of providing researchers with an improved user journey to scholarly content through:

1. Streamlined Access: Signalling access, and minimising paywalls, authentication steps and “access denied” experiences for researchers accessing articles; 
2. Collaboration and Simplified Workflow: Enabling discovery services and scholarly collaboration networks to provide streamlined access to the version of record of the article that researchers are entitled to, via their institution subscriptions;
3. Level Playing Field: Creating a service for all publishers, discovery services and SCNs to participate in, with transparent governance;
4. Global Standards: Accelerating global adoption of industry standards and use of common, open standards where possible.

The GetFTR initiative addressed this by asking Equal Experts to design and develop an API that functions as a direct bridge between research discovery services / collaboration networks and publisher platforms. This enables real-time subscription checking conducted by publishers, and fast links to content, removing unnecessary steps in the authentication process. 

It is the goal of the five initial founders to seek to include all scholarly and society publishers into the GetFTR ecosystem; therefore, the challenge for Equal Experts was that the infrastructure supporting the Entitlements API must be highly scalable to support end users worldwide, with a high volume of concurrent traffic.