What is the problem?
PSI has been working with publishers for many years, helping them to work together to address overarching problems affecting the community as a whole. PSI aims to facilitate legitimate access to content generally by enabling collaboration between publishers and their customers and specifically, through theIPregistry.org, by improving the reliability of IP address data and the way it is communicated and managed. Recent experience indicates that up to 13% of IP addresses manually input into publishers’ authentication systems are likely to be inaccurate. Historically, when PSI has cleaned IP address data for publishers up to 40% of IP addresses have been removed as they are either out-of-date or incorrectly allocated. Use of theIPregistry.org dramatically improves the data which, when incorrect, can be costly to both publishers and libraries for many reasons:
Unlicensed access – too broad an IP range can facilitate institutions piggy-backing on the licences of others and thus gaining free access.
Inaccurate usage statistics – wrongly entered, duplicated or over-lapping IP ranges can cause accesses and/or downloads to be counted multiple times. Too narrow an IP range can mean institutions have insufficient access and lead to increased turn-aways.
