If you attended our Tectonic Shifts webinar in March, you may be wondering what’s changed since then. (If you didn’t, don’t worry: you’ll find the recorded webinar here, featuring Hisham Shahtout, Senior VP of Engineering, and Mike Markey, VP of Security and Governance.)
To recap: New accessibility requirements for websites and frontlist online content are coming as a result of the European Accessibility Act; bad actors with access to low-cost botnets and cloud-based servers require security solutions beyond IP-based abuse management; and privacy protocols are changing as Apple anonymizes users’ IP addresses and Google moves to eliminate tracking cookies.
So what’s the latest?
Accessibility
The European Accessibility Act is set to take effect in July 2025. At the moment, the ball is in the court of the EU member states as they determine their own interpretations of the EU proposal; our experts are keeping tabs on EAA-related discussions, and we’ll have updates when we know more.
Meanwhile, we have two active and enthusiastic Community Interest Groups of Literatum clients focused on accessibility, and we encourage you to join them! You can also watch the session “Publishing accessible content: Practical ways to move the needle” from the last Atypon Community Meeting, and browse the accessibility-related resource linked on our Community Resources page.
Security
Our in-house experts report that session counts across Literatum websites continue to go up, partly as a result of bot traffic—but also that thanks to the security measures discussed in the March webinar, Literatum continues to pick up and block this kind of abuse from our customers’ sites.
Privacy
The webinar offers a deep dive into the future of privacy on the internet, but if you remember nothing else, remember this: with Apple anonymizing users’ IP addresses and Google phasing out cookies, every organization with a presence on the web will need to find new ways to identify visitors and personalize their user experience, and scholarly publishing is no different.
For Literatum customers who have adopted it, Atypon’s CONNECT identity management management service lowers the barrier for new site visitors to become registered users through a simplified registration workflow—which allows them to take your content with them wherever they go, while giving you the tools to personalize their experience and keep them coming back.
We’re rolling out CONNECT to all Literatum sites, so that all our customers and their readers benefit from these advantages in a post-cookie, post-IP-tracking world.
Watch our webinar “Breaking down access barriers with GetFTR, SeamlessAccess, and CONNECT” to learn more about how you can use these tools to create better user experiences and draw in more traffic to the version of record for your publications!
And for an in-depth look at using CONNECT to improve access to your content, check out our latest case study, “How Sabinet African Journals ensured institutional access for remote researchers with Atypon CONNECT.”
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Watch this space for further updates, and subscribe to our Community Newsletter to stay on top of the latest news.