Why all services are not on on single account platform?
Answers
Academic institutions and their libraries, scholarly publishers, standards bodies, discovery services, and other intermediaries have developed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of user identifiers and accounts. Each attempts to serve the needs of faculty members, students, and other users, in the context of a single organizational setting or service offering. Collectively, they present several difficult problems for academia and scholarly research. The best solution for research, teaching, and learning would be a single account for each user, controlled by that individual, and accepted portably across services and platforms.
In recent years, a number of services have been developed or expanded to help scholarly identity, and user accounts, become more portable and powerful. ORCID offers a standard way to track the scholarly contributions of an individual, provides an interchange across proprietary author services products, and serves as the basis for a growing array of new services. Through Eduroam, scholars and students visiting universities where they are not affiliated can use their own university credentials for seamless internet access. The Shibboleth federated identity service improves offsite access to licensed e-resources. And in a more proprietary but surely no less powerful move, Elsevier is linking Mendeley user accounts with those on Scopus and ScienceDirect, which should allow more effective services by tracking scholars across these important platforms. Each of these initiatives is generating real value, but none solves the underlying problem.
The underlying problem is straightforward: Academics’ expectations for user experience are set not by reference to improvements relative to the past but increasingly in comparison with their experiences on consumer internet services and mobile devices.
Social login, the use of an identity service provided by Facebook, Apple, Google, or Twitter to personalize features of a third party service without requiring a separate username or password, is a common and relevant example. The providers of these identity services (and associated wallet functionalities) are delighted to learn more about user preferences and activities to drive their advertising and platform businesses. Users have one less password to remember. Social login – the ability to use some kind of account portably to login elsewhere – ideally would provide access to licensed e-resources but at a minimum would provide personalized services. Social login is a base-case user expectation – one where academic libraries and scholarly publishers fall unambiguously short.
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