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Institutional Access — let a library's readers in without individual logins

Give a university, school district or corporate library access to your paid or private publications by IP range, EZProxy gateway or a shareable link — no account needed for each reader.

Institutional Access

Libraries don't buy the way individuals do. A university or school district signs one agreement and then expects everyone on campus to be able to read, without each person creating an account. Institutional Access is how you support that: you register how an institution's readers arrive, and ZenFlip recognises them and lets them through.

It applies to publications a reader would otherwise have to pay for, sign in for, or fill a form for. A publication that is already public needs none of this.

Who can set it up

  • Plan: Enterprise only. On other plans the Institutional Access page shows

what it does and a prompt to talk to us.

  • Role: Admins and Owners.

Go to Settings → Institutional Access.

The three methods

Pick whichever matches how the institution's readers actually reach you. You can register several rules, including more than one per institution — a university with two campus networks and a proxy can have all three.

IP Range

The standard way campuses are recognised. Readers coming from an address inside the range get access automatically, with nothing to click.

  1. Click to create a new access rule and choose IP Range

  1. Give it the institution's name (for example Harvard University Library) —

this is what you'll see in your own list, so make it recognisable

  1. Enter the ranges in CIDR notation, one per line:

` 140.247.0.0/16 128.103.0.0/16 `

  1. Save

Ask the institution's library or IT team for their public IP ranges — they will have them to hand, because every other publisher asks for the same thing. Don't guess them from a reader's address: one reader's IP tells you nothing about the range the institution owns, and too wide a range gives access away.

EZProxy

Many academic libraries put their readers through an EZProxy gateway rather than exposing campus addresses. Choose EZProxy and, if you know it, enter the institution's proxy host:

` ezproxy.harvard.edu `

The host is optional. Left blank, ZenFlip falls back to detecting EZProxy traffic generally — useful when you're setting a library up and don't yet have their hostname, but less precise. Fill it in once you know it.

A word on how this one works: EZProxy rules match on the referring host, which is information the reader's browser sends and which a determined person can forge. It carries real library traffic perfectly well, and it is what libraries expect to be offered. But if the content is valuable enough that you'd mind someone getting in who shouldn't, pair it with an IP range rule — an address is much harder to fake than a header.

Shareable URL

A signed link you send to a named person — typically a librarian — who clicks it once to activate access for their institution. Choose Shareable URL, name the institution, save, and share the link that's generated.

This is the quickest way to get a new customer reading on the day you close the deal, before anyone has exchanged IP ranges. Treat the link as a credential: anyone who has it can activate the access, so send it directly to your contact rather than posting it anywhere.

What a reader sees

Nothing, mostly — which is the point. A reader arriving from a registered IP range or through a recognised EZProxy gateway opens the publication and reads it. No sign-up, no payment, no lead form, and nothing on screen announcing itself.

The one exception is the Shareable URL method: the person who clicks the link sees a short welcome banner naming their institution, confirming that access has been activated. That's shown once, on arrival, so your contact can see the link worked.

Trusted Referrer rules are retired

If you set up Trusted Referrer rules in the past, you'll still see them listed, marked as retired. They no longer grant access, and new ones can't be created.

They were removed because a referrer is set by the reader's own browser and can be forged by anyone who wants to — which meant a Trusted Referrer rule could be used to open private, lead-gated and paid publications by someone with no connection to the institution at all. We'd rather tell you that plainly than leave the rules in place looking like protection.

The replacements, depending on what you were using them for:

  • To recognise an institution → an IP Range rule, or EZProxy if they use a

gateway.

  • To stop your flipbook being embedded on other people's sites → that was

never really what referrer rules did. Use the allowed-embed-domains list in Share → Embed → Where can this be embedded?, which the browser enforces. See Sharing & Embedding.

Existing retired rules are safe to delete whenever you like.