2015 Charleston Library Conference

In a world where there is an increasing expectation that "one click will get you there", this session examines just how difficult it can often be for a researcher to access journal content to which their own institution has a current institutional license, because of inefficiencies in the infrastructure provided by publishers, libraries, aggregators, platform providers, alerting services, discovery services, link resolvers, proxy servers, and authentication systems. These challenges affect users across all types of institutions, and they are growing in importance as online and distance education advances and usage of mobile devices explodes in the shift towards a post-PC environment.

In developing countries these challenges are often exacerbated by additional factors like low bandwidth, but public-private initiative Research4Life has developed a technical solution to at least one of the other challenges. Details of this will be shared along with the implementation hurdles encountered along the way, what Research4Life aims to do to improve its user experience further, and the challenges faced in taking its plans forward.

As library-intermediary-publisher partnerships work to address these issues for more advanced environments, there are opportunities to learn from the needs and plans of developing world initiatives as well.