The Authority File

Nature.com recently became the first journal to roll out Seamless Access, a new federated authentication system designed to connect researchers with the version of record rather than pirated copies of journal articles. Librarians, however, have expressed privacy concerns about the federated access model. Laird Barrett, Digital Product Manager at Springer Nature, addresses those concerns and more in this episode. At the end of the day, libraries and publishers “have a shared end-user and customer in all this which is the researcher… I think we both want to enable their access to legitimate and trusted sources.”

In this final episode on Seamless Access, Barrett offers the inside publisher scoop on how researchers use their devices, the differing North American and European views of federated authentication, and a possible standardized, transparent practice for data collection between publishers and end-users.

In academic publishing, nothing exists without controversy. When Seamless Access came out last year, both praise and apprehension spread. Because Seamless Access has the ability to collect information on a user, librarians voiced privacy concerns.

Heather Flanagan, Program Director at SeamlessAccess.org, remains adamant, “Seamless Access is about the identity discovery process. That’s really all it is. It’s not about storing a user name. It’s not about storing a user password … The identity provider actually controls that behavior.”

In this episode, Laird Barrett, Digital Product Manager at Springer Nature, joins Flanagan to discuss these concerns. They dig into the biggest misconceptions surrounding the service, and what they have done to set the record straight, asking: “What can we present to help people understand what the service is and what the service isn’t?” This episode parses exactly those questions.

Laird Barrett, Digital Product Manager at Springer Nature, understands the need for collaboration to ease authentication services. Barrett explains, “researchers are bouncing in between publishers’ sites to get content, so if you just make that authentication experience easier on one publisher’s site, that doesn’t really solve the problem for researchers.”

In this episode, Barrett discusses Springer Nature’s collaborative efforts to facilitate the authentication process. Springer, the first publisher to implement Seamless Access, recently teamed up with a group of five publishers to develop a more efficient way for researchers to learn if they have access to content.

Heather Flanagan, Program Director at SeamlessAccess.org, points out that the publisher collaboration is great, but that institutional politics and a lack of communication between libraries and the campus IT department are potentially bigger hurdles for Seamless Access advocates. As Barrett articulates, both parties, publishers and Seamless Access developers, have the same question in mind: “What’s the next piece of pain that you can suck out for researchers?”

A one-step, streamlined access service born out of the RA21 initiative last June, Seamless Access uses federated identity as its authentication process to allow researchers to access content from different publishers at any place or time—not just when they’re using their institution’s IP address. Simple, right?

Still technically a beta service, Seamless Access has needed to revise its model to please researchers, publishers, and librarians. Should the Seamless Access button have one universal button design on all publishers’ websites? What if it clashes with a publishers’ site design? Why isn’t proxy authentication good enough? Why are librarians raising privacy concerns? What’s the difference between Seamless Access and GetFTR?

In this episode, Heather Flanagan, Program Director at SeamlessAccess.org, explains how Seamless Access has had to accommodate publishers’ and researchers’ concerns. Laird Barrett, Digital Product Manager at Springer Nature, discusses what drove Springer Nature to become the first academic publisher to implement Seamless Access on Nature.com, and what he thinks makes the service so appealing to end users. Find out what Seamless Access is. Learn about librarians’ initial concerns, and discover how to solve them.

The definition of field research is “to collect qualitative data.” Though a rather scientific description, David Danelo, Director of Field Research for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, argues that at the heart of all field research is a story. While writing his latest book, The Field Researcher’s Handbook: A Guide to the Art and Science of Professional Fieldwork, Danelo wanted to emphasize how storytelling is the ultimate goal of research. “Story is about relating change, and so when we’re talking about the experience of field research, we’re talking about the experience of change.”

In the final episode of this four-part series, Danelo, a former US Marine Corps infantry officer, also talks the more personal side of field research. He explains how going from a life in the military, something “very focused on delivering solutions that were more martial and violent and definitive,” to a profession based in empathy, compassion, and most importantly, listening, has affected him as a person: “It’s really just a chance to listen to people talk about things that matter to them … a chance to connect in a new way with our common humanity.”

An art inherently tied to sensory details, field research can’t be replicated through the screen. Even in today’s digital age, David Danelo, Director of Field Research for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, believes “that kinesthetic experience of understanding a problem set in the field is central to advancing knowledge in any body of work.”

In this episode, Danelo explains that field research is more than an immersion of the five senses. It’s an experience that should leave the researcher with unexpected questions. His latest work, The Field Researcher’s Handbook: A Guide to the Art and Science of Professional Fieldwork, details how because a researcher must look at the world from a new perspective or positionality, they are bound to end up with a greater understanding of what they don’t know. Instead of balking at the number of questions yet to be explored, Danelo believes that researchers should be honest if their conclusions don’t reflect their initial thesis, since inevitably, “simply by getting onto the ground and asking questions, you’re going to end up in that category of unknown unknowns.”

As a former Marine Corps infantry officer, David Danelo knows that a researcher’s unique background and life experiences shape their perspective and can bias them even before they get out in the field. Not being aware of biases and how they could impact perspective is a major liability for a researcher. Danelo, Director of Field Research for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, believes self-awareness is crucial, as a researcher can naturally elicit trust or build rapport with particular groups of people based on their life experience. The key, Danelo claims, is that you aren’t “going to change who you are, but you can use who you are to your maximum advantage in collecting data.”

In this week’s episode, Danelo unpacks his latest book, The Field Researcher’s Handbook: A Guide to the Art and Science of Professional Fieldwork, explaining how the true art of data collection, he believes, “is just knowing yourself well enough to understand what your skill sets are and how they relate in the field.”

For David Danelo, the road to defining his job title was a long one. A Naval Academy graduate and US Marine Corps infantry officer, he knew after serving that he wanted to be paid to travel and write—a good place to start, but how to find a steady foothold within the freelance journalism world? The answer, he discovered, was in front of him all along: field research.

In this episode, Danelo, the Director of Field Research for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, explains that though he would later come to define his type of writing as field research, which is, essentially, data collection in the real world, he spent years writing without a solid definition for his work. In his latest volume, The Field Researcher’s Handbook: A Guide to the Art and Science of Professional Fieldwork, he makes the point to show how field research includes many areas outside academia, such as manufacturing, energy, and other trades. Danelo believes extending beyond theory and “really trying to tease out” the methodology of field research makes for a comprehensive book that’s applicable both outside and in the scholarly world.

Are ‘.org’ websites still more trustworthy than ‘.com’ ones? If a source has been tampered with, is it still a primary source? How do we teach students what is trustworthy or not if it’s something we’re just supposed to know?

In this week’s episode, Ellen Carillo, assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, discusses authority online, or lack thereof, the differences between primary and secondary sources, and how “seeking out perspectives that don’t align with your own can help students mitigate the consequences of bias.” Carillo reasons that teaching students how to understand their own partiality and reactions to news stories can help them separate background from fact, therefore helping determine the credibility of a digital source.

Carillo hopes the lesson plans in her latest book, the MLA Guide to Digital Literacy, will teach students how to “go from searching for, collecting, and synthesizing sources to constructing their own knowledge, their own definitions.” Carillo unpacks why the book’s media bias chart and lessons are fantastic tools to teach digital literacy skills, skills she hopes will stick long past graduation.

Social media has made sharing everything from cat videos to manifestos easier than ever. To paraphrase Spiderman, “But with great ease comes great responsibility…” The responsibility to properly evaluate myriad sources. Ellen Carillo, assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, unpacks what it means to read digital media laterally, in short, by reading across the web from site to site, rather than vertically down a single source. Her latest volume, the nuanced MLA Guide to Digital Literacy, extends the practice of digital literacy beyond rudimentary checklists, and gives students the context for why these digital literacy tools are needed in America today.