HighWire's IP management system is based on the key concept of IP groups. Related IP addresses are
collected in groups, which can then be assigned to subscriptions based on similar license agreements.
Therefore, you might have one group for a main campus, another for a remote facility, and another for an
authenticated proxy server. Each subscription can have as many or as few IP groups assigned as necessary,
and more than one IP group can contain the same IP address.
IP groups are maintained via the HighWire site, eliminating the need to visit several journal sites to
maintain your IP information. Any changes to an IP group will carry over to all its associated subscriptions.
You are not required to use the HighWire system to manage your IP information. You may still make any
necessary changes on a site-by-site basis, if you prefer.
TRANSITION:
Before you begin to modify any of your IP information or consolidate groups, you should first gather
all authorized IP ranges for your institution. You should also be aware of the online access policies
for each journal site, which will determine which ranges can be applied to each subscription. You may
wish to take a look at the two page views of your IP information: View
by Journal/Publisher and View by IP Group. These pages will provide
a general overview of how the information is arranged, and they will be the main starting points for most of your IP-related tasks.
When you first visit the IP management pages, you will notice that one IP group has already been created for
each of your subscriptions, including a name and all IPs previously registered for that subscription. You will
most likely want to replace these automatically generated groups with as few IP groups as possible.
The consolidation and reorganization of IP groups may take a bit of work the first time you need to make
changes. You may wish to give yourself some extra time on your first visit to the IP management pages. Once
everything is set up according to your needs, future changes will be much faster and easier.
RECOMMENDED APPROACH:
In order to consolidate your existing IP groups, you should first compare the IP addresses belonging to each
group to determine which subscriptions share the same set of IPs. You can go about this in a couple different
ways: you can visually compare different groups by viewing them all on a single
page, or you can compare two IP groups and the system will tell you the differences
between them. The second option is especially handy for long lists of IPs.
We recommend you create new IP groups rather than use the ones automatically generated for your subscriptions.
You can create one IP group for each of your authorized IP sets and apply that group to all allowable subscriptions.
Once you create and assign new IP groups, you can unassign and delete the old groups.
For example, let's say that Stanford University has subscriptions to 200 HighWire-affiliated journals. Stanford
has a main campus and several remote locations: a marine biology station 100 miles away, a veterans hospital in the
adjacent town of Palo Alto, a campus in Washington, DC, and many other campuses abroad. Some journal license terms
allow one or more of these remote locations to be included in the campus license. The administrator would create
the following IP Groups, named appropriately:
Main Campus
Marine Lab
Authenticated Proxy
Veterans Hosp
Off-campus Modem Pool
Non-California campuses
Each of these six groups would contain its own unique set of IP addresses, with ranges and wildcards as needed
(see IP Help). Depending on each journal's licensing terms, one or more of these
six IP groups could be assigned to subscriptions as appropriate.