For those of you who can't read attachments, here is Andrea's message again
in plain text.

All the best

Sam

-----Original Message-----
From: An informal open list, set up under the auspices of the United
Kingdom Seri [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Andrea
Keyhani
Sent: 12 June 2001 21:50
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Another ingenta update

Subject: Another ingenta update

The following information will, I hope, clarify some of the functionality of
the new ingenta.com, and answer the questions recently sent to the list.

* Authentication

Yesterday Kirsty Meddings sent round an e-mail confirming that we had fixed
all of the bugs regarding IP and ATHENS authentication to ingenta.
Unfortunately we have found that some institutions are still affected by a
bug that stops their IP address from being recognised. We know how
frustrating it is for those that it does affect, and are working on them as
a matter of top priority. We will let you know when it has been fixed.

* Express Registration

There have been a number of concerns about our express registration form.

One reason people have been finding it so irritating is because they have
seen it many times when they shouldn’t. This is because our authentication
process hasn’t been working faultlessly (please see point above).

However, even when authentication is working faultlessly, we acknowledge the
form still causes some confusion.

If a user has logged in with an ATHENS user name and password, ingenta does
not recognise them (although we can match them up with an institution and
therefore that institution’s subscriptions).

This means that if they try to access a journal to which their institution
does not subscribe to, ingenta asks them to register for the service. Before
they can proceed to purchase the article. We ask for this information to
ascertain the location of the user. We do this in order to comply with
agreements with publishers and with US and European sales tax and VAT
legislation, and to calculate any price information in the currency relevant
to the user wherever possible, we need to collect a certain amount of
information. This information affects the presentation of the cost of the
item to that particular user and therefore the information must be collected
before the price is displayed and the transaction proceeds.

The amount of information collected is the minimum necessary for these
purposes and for the execution of a subsequent request for a full text or
fax article, and complies fully with the relevant European Data Protection
legislation.

We recognise this is not an ideal situation from an ATHENS user’s
perspective. To improve the situation, we will be implementing a change
which would allow ingenta to recognise whether a user is coming in with an
ATHENS or IP authentication (and is thus allied to a particular site), or
whether they are a guest user or not logged in. We will then be able to give
a more tailored message at that point. However, implementing this change
will take some time.

As an interim solution, we are changing the copy on the express registration
form to explain that the user is seeing this because we cannot match them to
a subscription for that journal. We will also make clear that the
registration form is to be filled in if they wish to make a purchase of the
article.

*Searching UnCover Plus and Online Articles

A search in UnCover Plus will return results from UnCover journals and the
online journals from ingenta and CatchWord.  There are, however, a small
number of online journals (less than 10%) that are not yet indexed in the
UnCover Plus database, hence the inconsistent search results quoted by
Nicholas Lewis.  We are working on integrating these remaining ingenta and
CatchWord journals into the UnCover Plus database, and it is our intention
that users should be able to search all articles through a single interface.
We are also changing the wording of the site so that if a search should
return no results in the UnCover Plus database, users are directed to the
Online Articles database.

If you have any further questions or queries, please do not hesitate to
contact [log in to unmask]

Sincerely,

Andrea Keyhani
Chief Operating Officer
ingenta, inc.