In close collaboration with the scholarly publishing community, CCC delivered another year of customer-driven enhancements to our market-leading solutions to better support publishers in automating their evolving publishing models.
As we settle into 2025, here is a recap of last year’s key improvements to each of the products in our Scholarly Communications Suite: RightsLink for Scientific Communications, Ringgold Solutions, OA Intelligence, and RightsLink Author Services.
RightsLink for Scientific Communications
Last year marked the 10th anniversary of RightsLink for Scientific Communications, the market-leading OA workflow solution. In response to the needs of our customers, we released several key updates focused on author experience and agreement program precision.
Gathered Customer Insight to Inform Our Roadmap
In February, we held our annual User Experience Workshop where we gathered customer requests—some of which made it into our very next release.
Over the summer, we hosted a series of virtual gatherings with publishers to gain their insight on new and complex challenges surrounding the future of Open Access (OA) publishing to inform our strategic roadmap.
Redesigned Author Payment Experience and Funding Request Workflows
In June, we launched major upgrades focused on enhancing the author experience, including an end-to-end upgrade of the author APC payment and funding request workflows. These enhancements came directly from researcher feedback on the APC checkout process and cross-stakeholder collaboration to re-evaluate the OA author journey. The new author workflow removes identified pain points for authors choosing to publish OA.
Since our updates to the APC payment and funding request workflows, we have seen significant improvement in authors’ feedback on the order experience: A 15% increase in authors’ perceived ease of use and a 12% increase in authors’ overall satisfaction with RightsLink across all publishers’ unique order workflows.
Enabled Greater Precision for RightsLink and Ringgold Customers
In November, RightsLink focused on continued improvements to agreement management with features that enabled publishers to manage their OA agreement program with greater precision.
One new feature that supports this precision is the ability for Ringgold Identify Database customers to enable Ringgold exceptions under agreements that exclude particular entities.
In agreements, a publisher may wish to exclude a specific entity (e.g. a university hospital that is not covered by the deal). RightsLink publishers who license the Ringgold Identify Database are now able to view the entire Ringgold hierarchy and exclude specific children that are not covered by the deal.
OA Intelligence
As more publishers adopted OA Intelligence, CCC’s newest solution for affiliation disambiguation and OA agreement modeling, we continued to develop the product based on continuous market and customer feedback.
Improved Organization Matching with New Filters
OA Intelligence now enables matches to non-academic organizations, such as government entities and corporations, and the ability to filter by article types that are relevant to an agreement (e.g., when research articles are part of a deal, but reviews are not).
Released Institution Grouping Tool to Manage Consortia Agreements
OA Intelligence continues to fine-tune its agreement modeling technology to support publishers’ agreement strategies in three easy steps: Disambiguate and Prepare, Build, and Analyze.
Based on customer feedback, OA Intelligence users can now create and manage groups of institutions. Many publishers model agreements for entire consortia. OA Intelligence’s new institution grouping tools allow users to create custom groups of institutions and save them for later use.
Also, there are now institution group filters in the Disambiguate and Prepare step. Once a user has created an institution group, these groups can be applied to different agreement models, allowing publishers to quickly model a menu of agreement offers for consortia customers.
Ringgold Solutions
In 2024, we released enhancements to Ringgold Solutions, the leading organization persistent identifier (PID) solution trusted by 80 publishers, service providers, and funders for 20 years. The updates focused on improving key benefits of the Ringgold Identify Database API.
Released Updated API to Improve Search Functionality
We made several updates to the Ringgold Identify Database API to improve special character handling and make the search functionality more powerful.
Helped Customers Standardize and Disambiguate Organization Data
IEEE shared their success story using Ringgold Identify Database to streamline its submission process and standardize and disambiguate its organization data.
Integrated with Kriyadocs to Enhance Data Accuracy
Ringgold partnered with Kriyadocs to integrate with the Ringgold Identify Database to enhance data accuracy by ensuring precise, up-to-date organization data, boost workflow efficiency with streamlined data processing, and offer global consistency for seamless collaboration and data sharing.
Updated a Record Number of Organizations to Database
We updated 114,000+ records and added 45,000+ records to Ringgold Identify Database—the greatest number of updates in a single year. Identify Database now holds over 656,000 organization records.
RightsLink Author Services
With OA growth, we are seeing increased interest from publishers who want to experiment with author services through RightsLink to diversify revenue and enhance the author experience. With RightsLink Author Services, publishers can automate and scale a suite of offers including research promotion services, author reprints/eprints, page and color charges, cover charges, and more.
Coming Soon: Increased Flexibility in Author Service Offerings
With experimentation as a focus, RightsLink for Scientific Communications will soon launch a “flexible module” enabling publishers to easily use their existing manuscript metadata integration to offer any set of up to four products to one or more authors, at any stage of the manuscript lifecycle.
This new module will support publishers’ evolving OA programs with fresh revenue streams, such as offering new author services, presenting a new point of sale for society memberships, or trialing product sales on a subset of journals before expanding to the full portfolio.
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