Zotero institution accounts and graduates

bjuhl

We're considering asking for budget funds towards a Zotero institution storage account. For libraries who have funded this, how are graduates / alumni handled when they lose access to their campus domain email account? Does Zotero send some kind of storage warning if the primary email address is changed to a non-university domain? Do you encourage users to make a new Zotero account and migrate their data?

Similarly, if you added institutional storage, how did users who registered their Zotero accounts with non-institutional email addresses migrate to use the new storage option? Do you have them add their campus email address and make that the primary email address?

Thanks - this is just an idea at this point but we are curious about the finer points.

dstillman

People take their Zotero accounts with them when they leave your institution. There's no need for them to create new accounts, nor should they.

An account can have multiple email addresses associated with it, and we recommend that people add a personal address and any institutional addresses. If one of their addresses is covered by an institutional storage plan, they'll have unlimited storage — it doesn't matter whether it's the primary address.

If an address is removed from the account and the person is over their free quota, they won't be able to sync additional files to Zotero servers without adding another subscription. Files online won't be deleted immediately when the subscription coverage ends, but they may be purged eventually to bring the account under its quota. Their local Zotero won't be affected.

If the person won't be covered by another subscription going forward, they'd want to make sure Zotero was set to download files "at sync time" in the Sync settings so that they had all files locally. They can continue to use Zotero locally without any restrictions regardless of their online storage quota.

We may periodically (e.g., once a year) ask people to re-verify an address that qualifies them for an institutional subscription.

bjuhl

Thanks so much @dstillman! that's what we need to know. Can Zotero provide a count of how many users are signing in with email accounts in our domain? That will help us "sell" the institution subscription proposal to our budget folks. thanks again.

dstillman

@bjuhl: We don't provide any information to institutions who don't currently have a subscription, in part because it wouldn't really be meaningful — people can use Zotero without accounts and create Zotero accounts using any email address, so until you've publicized your subscription within your community, the number of users with institutional email addresses wouldn't actually reflect eligible users (not to mention people who might start using Zotero if you start promoting it more heavily).

We can periodically provide the number of active users that qualify for storage under your subscription, though (e.g., to help justify a renewal).

In terms of selling it now, for general reasons why we believe people should choose Zotero over similar tools, see Why Zotero?. An institutional subscription allows everyone at your institution to use Zotero without limitations, which helps people better manage their research and encourages greater collaboration via group libraries. Finally, in addition to providing value for your users, purchasing an institutional subscription supports the continued development, maintenance, support, and infrastructure costs for all of Zotero's free software and services, which benefits the global academic and research community, including many people for whom commercial tools are out of reach.

bjuhl

thank you, @dstillman! We will try to reach out to current institutional subscribers to get their feedback as well.