Rights Management Technology: Introduction (Part 1)

Rights Management Technology in Today’s Educational Publishing World: Introduction

This is the first of a 3-part series on Rights Management Technology in Today’s Educational Publishing World.

Research, Rights, and Permissions services have often been managed with various types of inefficient workflows, threatening budgets and schedules, and exposing publishers to unwanted legal issues. Today, images are becoming an increasingly important aspect of print and digital educational materials, reflecting the diverse and dynamic social, economic, and cultural backgrounds that all learners can relate to, from preschool through adult continuing education.

In this blog series, we will discuss how a modern, customizable, and intuitive Rights Management and Lightbox Platform can provide the solution to these challenges and accommodate trends in the educational publishing space.

In Part 1 of this blog series, we will explore the historical context of the permissions process and how that led to the development of MPS digiRights.

In the Past

As recently as one decade ago, the permissions process involved working with hard copy manuscripts and previous edition files, having to sort through a stack of hundreds of pages held together with rubber bands and paper clips, and typing all of the information for the text and image assets into a log. From there, permissions were obtained by email, or very often by mailing physical letters or sending faxes, signing and returning licenses via mail, coding and submitting paper copies of invoices for payment, and then adding all of that documentation into a folder to be sent to file storage. Since that time, the few technology solutions available in the marketplace tended to be clunky, inefficient, and misaligned with the functional needs of rights and permissions executives.

The digiRights Solution

This blog will discuss some of the challenges that the Research, Rights, and Permissions space continues to face, and how a user-friendly and comprehensive Rights Management System—like MPS’ proprietary system digiRights—provides solutions to these challenges.

Built as part of the MPS DigiCore suite of content solutions, digiRights is a web- and cloud-based system that is highly customizable to suit any customer-specific needs in a secure and personalized platform. The inspiration for the creation of digiRights was based on MPS’ years of experience working in a variety of Rights Management Systems with inefficient workflows. The aim was for digiRights to be comprehensive, tracking as much information as required for a project or an asset, yet also easy to navigate. digiRights can be fully integrated with any client’s in-house data management system to seamlessly transfer valuable rights data. It has streamlined workflows for many of our educational publishing customers.