Access Control: Headache or Opportunity?
How can you put your content on the Web without giving it away for free?If you’re making a decision to go online, by now you’ll have heard about access control. A crucial component of any Web publishing program, this important technology will ensure that your subscribers can access your content, and that non-subscribers can’t get it for free. But if you’ve already invested in an access control solution and then moved on to the next big thing, you may be overlooking the many business benefits this technology has to offer.
Most publishers view access control from a defensive standpoint — as a necessary evil for protecting their content from unauthorized viewers. Ingenta’s publishers know better. They know that access control can offer a powerful tool for better serving their subscribers and promoting their research to a wider audience. Creatively used, an Access Control System (ACS) can offer a path to new subscribers, products and revenue — and a new direction for your publishing program.
WHAT IS ACCESS CONTROL?
When publishers talk about access control, they are looking for a way to manage and distribute their content in a secure online environment. Through access control, you can authenticate, authorize and provide access to your subscribers, while ensuring non-subscribers don’t get access for free. The most common mechanisms used for authenticating subscribers are user name and password for individual subscribers and IP address and address range for institutional subscribers. How the actual process works depends on where your users are coming from, what subscriptions they’re entitled to and what access control features you’ve opted for.
But in addition to protecting your intellectual property, ideally your ACS should be able to support your other critical business needs. That’s where it’s important to choose an ACS specifically designed for publishers, as opposed to a generic or standard ACS. Through a publisher-specific ACS, you will be in a better position to handle more complex subscription transactions, such as pay-per-view purchases, consortial licenses or purchases of bundled articles. And the more flexible your ACS, the better you can tap the business opportunities described below.
HOW YOU CAN GROW YOUR BUSINESS THROUGH ACCESS CONTROL:
At Ingenta, we offer publisher-centric access control solutions that enable you to maximize the value of your Web investment. We can help you:
• Offer pay-per-view options to non-subscribers. Through our secure e-commerce system, you can offer non-subscribers a convenient alternative for downloading content that was previously unavailable to them. Rather than turning away non-subscribers empty-handed, you can leverage your ACS to collect new pay-per-view revenue and increase the likelihood that they’ll eventually subscribe.
• Collect valuable statistics on your users. By building a statistics function into your ACS, you can gain valuable insight into which articles are most popular, which content trials received the most traffic and which non-subscribers visit your site most frequently. You can then adjust your editorial and marketing policies to better suit your market's needs.
• Promote your content to a wider audience through free content trials. Many Ingenta publishers offer three-month content trials to attract potential subscribers and publicize their new research. If you rotate the articles you want to promote or the length of time that they’re available for free, you can gauge which offers are most effective and keep pushing those promotions.
TAKING IT ONE STEP FURTHER WITH CUSTOMIZED ACS OPTIONS:
For publishers who want to further expand their Web publishing programs, we offer customized access control solutions that can help you:
• Always recognize your subscribers — wherever, whenever. A basic ACS can recognize a subscriber in a "normal" situation, but will get thrown if she changes her habits. For instance, it may recognize her when she’s working from her local library, but not if she’s working from home — or when she’s using one A&I service but not when she’s using another. At Ingenta, we employ a range of technologies to ensure consistent recognition of subscribers, including cookies, domain names, referral URLs and intersite links. This means that our systems will always authorize your subscribers, no matter where they are in the world, which route they took to access your content, or which computer they’re dialing in from.
• Serve your researchers’ unique needs by offering flexible subscription packages. Different researchers have different requirements. It’s worth trying to accommodate these varied needs. We can help you offer tiered levels of access to your content where a standard subscriber might have access to just one journal and a VIP subscriber might be entitled to your entire content collection. These kinds of flexible purchasing options will help you ensure maximum satisfaction and loyalty from your subscribers.
• Experiment with new content and business models, while evolving with industry trends. We can offer you great flexibility in repackaging your content in different formats and at different prices so you can test what the market responds to. For instance, you could bundle articles on the same subject together or offer your backfiles in one comprehensive package. By offering subscribers different ways to subscribe to your content, you can continually refine your business model and be one step ahead for the next industry trend.
These are just some of the opportunities available to you, if you view your ACS as a powerful tool rather than as a time-consuming expense. If you have any questions about how you can use access control to further enhance your Web program, please email your client manager. We'd be happy to have a conversation about how our ACS solutions might further your online publishing investment.