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. The initial clean up project undertaken by PSI indicated that 58% of the IP ranges publishers held to authenticate their institutional customers were incorrect. Creation of theIPregistry.org has helped to dramatically improve this situation which 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.