We’ve always tried to keep Trip as open and easy to use as possible. But Trip’s content collection and search results reflect years of indexing, classification and curation, and they are increasingly being targeted by large-scale automated extraction, bots and scrapers systematically working through our results to collect records and source links in bulk, rather than people using Trip to answer genuine clinical or research questions.

To protect that work, and to keep Trip fast and reliable for everyone else, we’ll shortly be introducing one change: opening a source document will require either signing in or being recognised through an institutional IP address. Creating a free account takes less than a minute.

Requiring authentication at this final step will also help us identify unusual patterns of activity and investigate potentially abusive use of Trip.

Searching will remain fully open, with no sign-in required, and results will continue to show the title, year and publisher so that relevance and provenance can be judged at a glance. Authentication will only be needed at the final step, when opening the source document.

We know that any additional step should be introduced reluctantly and only where necessary. We believe this is a proportionate way to protect Trip’s infrastructure, the curation behind the service, and the experience of the clinicians and researchers who rely on it every day.

We’ll confirm the exact date closer to launch.