June 2019 marks the debut of RightsLink Author’s Release 19. RightsLink Author is a sophisticated, industry-leading e-commerce platform facilitating the collection, management, and reporting of publication charges and supports transformative and Open Access publishing agreements. This quarter’s enhancements include a variety of new features developed in response to market shifts, customer requests, and ongoing efforts to maintain technical excellence.
The RightsLink Author team continues to focus on iterative improvements to our agreement management functionality, in addition to developments that enable the module to further support transformative agreements and variant publisher, institution, and funder requirements.
Major Enhancement: Expansion to Organization Affiliation Capabilities
Previously, manuscripts could be matched to special billing profiles for funding eligibility based on Ringgold IDs or Other IDs passed in manuscript metadata. In March 2019, we expanded this to include author email domains—so a manuscript could be identified as a match to a profile when the author’s email domain matched that of the institution.
Because passing consistent and accurate identifiers can be a challenge, and some publishers want to have multiple factors for verifying author eligibility, the latest release enables publishers to set up a special billing profile with one or more affiliation identifiers. In short, manuscript matches to these funding profiles can be driven off any combination of Ringgold IDs, email domains, and/or Other IDs, as opposed to just one type of ID.
More Highlights from Release 19
Tax information from External API
We now store additional information passed to us from our tax calculation service (Avalara) on each transaction. We have used this information to apply the relevant tax amounts to the order, but now we also expose the data via the RightsLink Author API.
Finance Reporting Methods for Manuscripts and Transactions
A new, optional field in the “Journals” section of our “Manage Configurations” tab in the Publisher Portal has been added. This field can be used for a variety of purposes including to associate journals with special finance codes in downstream reporting.
Enhanced Transaction Summary Report
A variety of additions and enhancements have been made to our transaction summary report to provide even more data about each transaction.
Customize “No Charges Selected” Message
It was brought to our attention that this message was not customizable in our UI Custom Text functionality, but it would be useful if it were, so we have added it to those self-service tools.
Looking Ahead
The RightsLink Author team is very focused on supporting transformative agreements and variant stakeholder requirements. We continue to develop functionality in this space, with deposit account tracking tools coming in our Release 20, which is targeted for Fall 2019. We look forward to sharing more details of this feature in the coming months.