Administration of institutional access (commercial usage)

[springday]

Dear PKP team,

I'm interested in certain functions of OMP that I couldn't find in the online demo or FAQ. A colleague is interested in using OMP for commercial sales of e-books towards large institutions (primarily libraries). Therefore the PKPlib functionality for IP range, LDAP and Shibboleth authentication is very much appreciated. However, unlike in OJS, access control to monographs would have to be much more finely grained: Institution A might pay for access to monographs 1, 5, 9, and 10, institution B might pay for access to monographs 1,3,4, and 6. Institution C might pay for access to a whole series of monographs instead of picking individual e-books.
Is such an individual administration of institutional access to monograph e-books already possible in OMP, or is it to be expected soon?

Best regards,
Kai Weber

[JasonNugent]

Hi Kai,

That level of granularity is currently not available within OMP, unfortunately. It's an interesting idea, though. Currently, subscriptions are assigned on a per-journal basis (as you know), and so are correlated through an assoc_id that represents a journal (assoc_type_journal). Just off the top of my head, it doesn't seem too difficult to extend that relationship to include assoc_type_monograph. Future work

Regards,
Jason

[springday]

Dear Jason,

thanks for your reply. I think my colleague has a certain deadline to meet, so waiting for OMP is probably not the right thing for him. However, I will certainly keep an eye on it - and hope for some less busy moments to get some time to play with a test installation of OMP myself.

Greetings,
Kai

[mbria]

I'm also thinking in this scenario.

A partial solution that you probably took in consideration: Autologin based on IP ranges?

You will need to code a little, but don't seams too hard.
Alec, do you think t's feasible?

Cheers,
m.

[asmecher]

Hi mbria,

Autologin and IP-based subscriptions are two different concerns; you generally wouldn't want IP-based autologins, as anyone from that institution would have an apparent user account (and they would all be the same). IP-based subscriptions don't mean a user is logged in, it just means access limitations are bypassed.

In any case, IP-based subscriptions are on the list -- we'll be working to consolidate code between OJS and OMP in the coming months, and that'll include subscription management.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[mbria]

> Autologin and IP-based subscriptions are two different concerns
You are completely right.

> In any case, IP-based subscriptions are on the list.
Is this list published or internal?
The roadmap (as far as I can see) don't talk much about the future of OMP.

Thanks for the info Alec.

Cheers,
m.

[asmecher]

Hi Marc,

Oops, that roadmap is indeed pretty out of date. I'll make sure we get it updated shortly.

Meanwhile, the broad picture is that we're working to reconcile implementations between all of our applications. Mostly that means that common code is moved into the pkp-lib shared library and then extended minimally in each application. That means that 1) the amount of code we're maintaining will greatly decrease, and 2) the feature set will gradually consolidate between applications. That'll eventually include things like subscription management -- but it'll be a long, slow undertaking, so I'd suggest considering a local modification if you need this feature before then. (I can describe how that would work if you'd like.)

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[mbria]

Thanks for the info.

> but it'll be a long, slow undertaking, so I'd suggest considering a local modification if you need this feature before then.
> (I can describe how that would work if you'd like.)

Thanks for the offer, but not as desperate yet.
First I need to convince my "boss" OMP is the right tool to do the job.
BTW, I have no doubts it is. Great job guys !!

Cheers,
m.