A Q&A with Shannon Reville
Faced with geopolitical pressures and the continuously evolving demands of a changing marketplace, scholarly publishers need powerful yet flexible solutions.
They need open access (OA) workflow solutions that offer peace of mind, time to think, and space to experiment.
That’s why CCC recently released several new features in RightsLink for Scientific Communications that offer just that. I spoke with Shannon Reville, Senior Product Manager at CCC, to learn more about these updates and the value they bring to RightsLink publishers and institutions.
In the first of this two-part Q&A series, Reville explains two of these new features: self-service affiliation discounting, and the Profiles and Agreements Report, which exports a wealth of data about a publisher’s institutional customer program.
RightsLink now allows publishers to manage their affiliation discount programs on their own through the Publisher Portal. What changed in the recent release?
Since 2018, RightsLink has supported publishers in the documentation and execution of many institutional relationships via institutional “profiles.” Publishers can easily create these profiles on their own in our Publisher Portal. However, historically those profiles typically represented unlimited publishing agreements, capped publishing agreements, or special billing situations where any APCs due could be invoiced directly to the institution for payment from a central OA fund. While those were previously the norms, we’re seeing the pendulum swing a bit, with some institutions reverting to discounts for their authors, rather than unlimited publishing, APC waivers, or centralized billing.
Now, publishers can manage these discounting relationships through the institutional profiles they know and love.
Specifically, the recent release includes a new type of profile, “Author-Invoiced Profiles,” where all eligibility terms, discounting structures, and workflow expectations are easily codified, and the author checkout experience is immediately updated to account for those new rules. These new profiles allow publishers to satisfy their institutional customers, and maintain a user-friendly, seamless checkout experience for authors.
Why does this matter to publishers and institutions?
Things move quickly in this market, and publishers need self-service tools to keep pace with the evolving needs of their institutional customers.
In doing so, institutions also gain value—by moving to ‘profiles’ all the reporting and oversight tools they have for unlimited deals through the Institutional Portal can now be supplied for any type of publishing deal. Institutions can access dashboards and reports about their authors’ APC payments and understand how many manuscripts are getting those discounts.
This benefit is key, because transparency in these deals is so critical, institutions want consistent data no matter what kind of deal they sign, and enabling access through the Institutional Portal they already trust removes manual effort from publishers to provide that reporting. Now it’s available with, quite literally, the click of a button.
What we understand from publishers, especially those that have robust institutional agreements, is that customer satisfaction is extremely important. Publishers need to meet their institutional customers’ unique requests with agility and precision. It’s a privilege for us to support these relationships and remove friction from what can be a complex process. Also, with library budgets and research funding dollars under intense pressure, it’s paramount that OA workflows continue to support a variety of payment models. CCC is committed to enhancing RightsLink to serve all OA business models between our publishers and the over 3,000 institutions working with our publishers.
The release also featured a new report, the Profiles and Agreements Report, which provides rich information about a publisher’s entire agreement program. What type of information is in the report, and why is it significant?
The report includes all comprehensive details of the relationship or deal a publisher has with an institution, as recorded in the Publisher Portal. This can include, for example, institutional billing and contact info, eligibility criteria, including persistent identifiers and for publishers using Ringgold, exception cases (such as the exclusion of university hospitals), invoicing preferences, etc. For publishers, everything there is to know about the relationship they have with an institution, formal or informal—so long as it’s been codified in RightsLink— is available in the report.
The new report helps publishers get all their institution program information in one place, especially for publishers that aren’t able to integrate with our API (where these details have been available). We always try to provide both downloadable files and API methods so that we can support the wide array of publishers’ technical capabilities, wherever they sit on that spectrum.
Whether they are filtering the report around specific agreements, looking at all the details of an agreement, looking at a list of a certain type of agreement, or at their entire program—what we know is that this report will be leveraged by most, if not all, publishers with OA agreements.
Are there plans to do more with this report?
It’s great that you asked, because we plan to create more configurable reporting capabilities in the Publisher Portal very soon. Publishers want to customize how their reports are sent to them, which fields are returned, and how they are formatted. They also want to schedule regular generations. We will soon offer these scheduling and customizable reporting options, starting with our flagship Transaction Summary Report, and then we’ll trickle down over time to the other reports, such as this new one.
How have publishers responded to these new features so far?
They’ve been responding extremely well. We had a great turnout at our release training sessions and at our annual user group, where we talked about our user needs and roadmap. The new report and support for quick affiliation discounting mark two of the top requests from our last user group.
We have a lot of creative thinkers among our publisher customers. Once I showed these new features, some of the publishers that I never would have expected to dabble with them got ideas of how they could use them for emerging projects. So, I think we will actually see more use than we anticipated, which, if you work in product management, is the dream.