The publishing arm of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is now part of Jisc’s OpenAthens federation.
Founded in 1962, MIT Press is now part of a cloud-based service allowing single sign-on to library web resources and applications from any country or sector.
As well as integrating with institutions still reliant on IP authentication, OpenAthens offers flexible control for managing access rights to groups of users, as well as comprehensive usage statistics showing how often content is accessed and by whom.
“We’ve seen an increase in customer demand for federated single sign-on access to library resources,” said Nick Lindsay, director of journals and open access at MIT Press.
“We are pleased that our library partners will now benefit from OpenAthens’ superior user experience and granular usage statistics.”
Brian Erb is director of library support and training at Florida Academic Library Services Cooperative.
“We see the most usage increases for resources on publisher platforms such as MIT Press that support federated single sign-on,” he said.
“This is because our library users often start their search for a specific article using Google rather than a library webpage, then simply log in using their institutional credentials.”
Kieran Prince, OpenAthens’ business development manager, professed himself “delighted” at MIT Press joining the federation. “Our library community will gain huge value from our collaboration,” he said.
