Libraries on the frontline: protecting research integrity
In the fight to safeguard academic credibility, authentication infrastructure is a vital line of defence, says Jon Bentley
You’d have to have a laser focus elsewhere not to notice the growing concern about research integrity. In recent months there have been many reports, conference sessions and webinars all looking at the risks institutions and researchers face when research is of uncertain quality or dubious provenance. Librarians are at the forefront of addressing this challenge: they lead their institutions in understanding its causes and confronting strategic risks to trust, reputation and funding.
Authentication matters
It can be difficult for an inexperienced researcher to judge the quality of the resources they find and use. Unfortunately, unvalidated or free resources are often the easiest to find during a general internet search – and the open web is often the first port of call when starting discovery.
On the other hand, when institutional libraries clearly signpost routes to valuable sources and provide a seamless authentication infrastructure that makes the experience straightforward, researchers and library users can access curated, quality-assured content easily and quickly – and all within the terms of licence and subscription agreements. High quality research resources take time and experience to collect. They are a valuable and unique asset for institutions that create them.
Trust through authentication
Reliable authentication, leading to a personalised experience, has for years been the foundation stone that research integrity is built on. Research organisations and researchers need it more now than ever. It enables frictionless access to quality material and gives researchers opportunities to work in partnership with the library team to build a reservoir of verified knowledge that is available to them over time. And crucially, this can be a personalised research experience that shares no more personalised information across platforms than is necessary.
I lead the OpenAthens team that, among other things, develops the authentication and access management solutions Connect and Compass. We track the browser changes and constantly shifting standards that affect users’ authentication needs, so our library customers in academic libraries, government, healthcare and corporate organisations don’t need to. We have an international, specialist service desk taking care of their implementation and support queries. Understanding their everyday problems – from broken links through to changing attribute release policies – gives us insight into what library users need from their library and what librarians need from an authentication solution if they’re going to provide support in our digital age. Doing so is essential when so much information is readily available and change happens fast.
Challenging times
Researchers today face constant challenges. There is always competition to secure funding and pressure to publish and demonstrate the work’s impact. We know the desire for speed and volume can lead to a loss of quality. A recent webinar by the British Geriatrics Society, new challenges to research integrity: what you should know, said there are some estimates that a third of the published literature in that field “may be tainted by questionable research practices”.
In addition, the move towards collaboration internationally and across disciplines creates risks as well as opportunities. It can cause missteps around data sharing, authorship and attribution, while the shift to open access publishing and open data calls for careful approaches to making sure quality is high and all parties in the publishing process are accountable.
And there are still more potential risks to research integrity coming into view.
What’s that coming over the hill….
Misinformation from commercial and politically vested interests (for example, in climate science) can derail or devalue research. Meanwhile, as geopolitical tensions increase, sanctions, political interference and surveillance can all make it harder to access accurate information or to pursue research avenues freely. Then there’s the growing sophistication of AI tools, which makes them more prevalent in research workflows but raises fresh concerns around plagiarism, accuracy and authorship.
Superior user experience
With these pressures building, institutions need the ally that sophisticated authentication infrastructure provides.
In an ideal scenario students and researchers hunting for resources will habitually make their institutional library their first port of call so they can use the quality resources that it has licensed for them. Again ideally, their library will enable this via single sign-on, using their institutional credentials to access the library’s licensed services from anywhere that has an internet connection – and they’ll choose to do it because they know their searches will be friction-free and secure.
If they’re lucky their library will have done more, offering federated single sign-on. It opens up a much wider world of discovery among the resources offered by all members of the federation. In the OpenAthens Federation, for example, there are several thousand partner organisations all over the world, all authorising their own users and verifying their credentials to every other federation partner to give library users free access to many more quality resources.
Federated single sign-on also allows resource providers to create a secure but wholly anonymised profile for each user, tracking their interests and preferences so they can suggest content relevant to earlier searches. Similarly, users can save searches and make annotations, vary formats and more.
It all adds up to a better user experience and improved research workflows, while for institutions themselves it means enhanced security. With fewer poorly managed passwords there is lower likelihood of successful cyber-attacks on institutional systems, and less chance of a reputationally-damaging data breach.
Libraries leading the way
Libraries are pivotal in protecting research integrity, and there are several things they can do to further the cause:
Advocate for research quality: offer training, guidance and case studies to educate researchers about the importance of conducting research ethically and effectively, and demonstrate how investment in authentication improves workflows and compliance, and supports better research.
Collaborate with IT and research offices: position authentication as part of the institution’s wider digital strategy rather than a purely library issue, so it gets the recognition and investment it needs. A library is designed to share information and knowledge – an attractive hot spot for a bad actor. With the right tools the researchers and the institution can remain protected.
Champion adopting an authentication solution that provides rich usage data: federated access systems such as OpenAthens offer valuable anonymised data about resource use and other metrics.
Focus on user experience: outmoded authentication methods that require library patrons to access library resources from specific locations, to remember multiple passwords or log-in systems and to log in numerous times, are frustrating. Users expect a seamless, secure discovery journey and if they don’t get it, they can look elsewhere.
Work with resource providers: some – mostly smaller – providers still don’t support federated access. Encouraging and supporting them to do so will ultimately benefit them and their business model as well as the wider research ecosystem.
I’ve been fortunate to attend sessions discussing these issues at conferences and webinars in recent months. Technology truly is a double-edged sword that brings huge benefits to the research process, but also associated risks as the scale and speed of research grows. Ultimately it is the integrity of the people who use the technology that offers the greatest protection against misuse – and libraries around the world are the true curators and guardians of research.
Jon Bentley is Commercial Director at OpenAthens