CASE STUDY
Enhancing Access and Visibility: Thieme’s Integration with GetFTR
Thieme, a leading provider of information and services to improve healthcare and health, recently joined GetFTR, further expanding GetFTR’s network of publishers. One of Thieme’s key goals is to ensure streamlined access to vital information when it’s needed most. GetFTR plays a critical role in accelerating discovery and access to content.
GetFTR spoke with Thomas Connertz, Senior Vice President eJournals & eBooks at Thieme, Joachim Engelland, IT Application Manager Medical Information Services at Thieme, and freelance developer Thomas Lange about making the GetFTR service work with a custom platform. Thieme’s eJournals & eBooks platform is Thieme’s own portal specifically designed for access to electronic content.
Why did you join GetFTR?
Being visible in the research community is important to us, and we are very interested and keen to increase the visibility of our content and to make it easier for researchers to access content they are entitled to. Participating in GetFTR helps demonstrate our commitment to supporting industry wide initiatives.
We run our own platform which in some ways makes it easier to be innovative, and we like to be early adopters of new initiatives and technology. We invited Hylke Koers, CIO of STM Solutions and Program Director for GetFTR, and Dianne Benham, Product Director, GetFTR, to present GetFTR to our staff after we had met with Hylke at a conference.
You have your own journals platform – how difficult was the set up process?
Our journals are hosted on a platform specified by Thieme and built by a 3rd party called Thieme Connect – the content and the access control system sits with the 3rd party, but we have a technical team managing aspects of it inhouse. We did have some initial concerns about performance requirements for speed, but we found a solution that does not put additional load on our access management system. We put one developer on the project and enlisted the help of the operations team. So whilst the process certainly needed technical expertise it was not overly complex.
After you decided to join, how long did the process take?
Not long at all, the process was fairly straightforward. We have our own platform and at first we were concerned that this may be a barrier to getting involved. However, we were reassured that GetFTR would help us through the process. We put our technical team in touch with Dianne Benham and the development team at GetFTR. They were all responsive and very helpful from the start.
Ultimately, it took around two weeks to develop an API to receive and respond to entitlement requests. The implementation guidance and the self-service portal were both incredibly helpful, and we easily worked through any challenges.
We started piloting GetFTR in 2023 and came onboard as a GetFTR partner in January 2024.
How will you measure the benefits?
The visual aspect of GetFTR impressed us – when you see the button you know you have access to the content. This delivers a very clear signal to the researcher and will hopefully encourage them to click on the articles with GetFTR buttons.
A direct impact on usage (e.g. COUNTER) is difficult to measure as there are so many influencing factors. However, based on the impressive click information that GetFTR provides, we can see that visibility is high. GetFTR entitlement checks have increased since implementation, so it’s all looking very positive, it’s just hard to correlate.
We look forward to further initiatives and developments, in particular GetFTR working with Crossref to strengthen research integrity.
