Institutional Subscription

[ALARjournal]

We want to limit access to our journal (first edition ready to go) to financial members of our association. Rather than add subscribers aa sindividuals, our attempted work-around is to create an Institutional Subscriber for the association and set up a link from the members only part of our website. But it isn't working - we can go through on the link of course, but on attempting to open an article, are asked for user name and password. Our OJS site when approached directly and not through our association site.

Can you help us pinpoint where we are going wrong:

1) We have created an Institutional Type, and assigned this to an Institutional User (our Association). We have our IP address in, and checked that it is not a proxy (which was highlighted as a possible problem at viewtopic.php?f=2&t=864&p=2783&hilit=institutional+subscription#p2783 ).

2) in the Access and Security Settings (/manager/setup/4), we have the following settings -

Journal will require subscriptions ....
Always show galley links and indicate restricted access

Additional Site and Article Access Restrictions ....
neither box is checked here – Users are not required to register or login to view

User Registrations
Have tried with “Users can register themselves .....”
and with “Journal Manager registers all users...”
Both options produce the requirement to enter username and password, which is what we want to avoid.

So we think we have explored all self managing options, and still cannot solve the problem.

Ross Colliver

[michael]

Hi Ross,

Unfortunately, this approach won't work: members who click on the link (destination) still arrive at your journal website from their personal PCs (source). OJS checks the IP of the source against its subscription records.

To achieve something along these lines, you would need to setup a proxy server for your members and direct them through that. The proxy server IP address would then be the source IP for all members and you could authenticate it against a single institutional subscription.

Otherwise, you will need to import your members as users into OJS and assign them individual subscriptions. OJS includes a user import facility that may be helpful with this.

Cheers,
Michael

[ALARjournal]

We are not quite sure what you mean by "proxy server for your members." Can you explain how that can be achieved?

[michael]

Hi Ross,

A proxy setup assumes that you already have a database of members that you can authenticate against (i.e. login) at your members website. Once authenticated, user's could access web resources (your journal) through a proxy and all members would appear to the journal as coming from the same IP address.

This setup is similar to that of university libraries that require faculty and students to login in order to access online commercial resources provided by third-parties (e.g. EBSCO journals). Faculty and students login with their university credentials at the library's website, which then proxies their requests for content that resides on commercial publishing sites.

Cheers,
Michael