Question 1

What can federated single sign-on do that IP authentication with VPN can't?

Accepted Answer

Federated access focuses on 'meeting the user where they are', meeting the user expectation of being able to navigate to a resource from the open web and gain access; without having then to retrace their steps to a library discovery tool to gain access or use a tool such as a VPN to gain access.  

Using federated SSO offers a fairly standardized experience when navigating to a vendor or publisher site, locating the institutional login and signing in. For example, vendors and publishers using Seamless Access offer a recognizable institutional login workflow.  

SSO allows for obtaining granular usage statistics (without releasing any personally identifiable information); at department, or group level, for example. This isn’t possible with IP access. Federated SSO also allows limiting access to a resource for specific groups, where they are only licensed to provide access for one department for example.  

Federated offers single sign-on not only to the content but also any personalization services offered by the website e.g. CPD/CME credits (continual professional development/ Continuing Medical Education), bookshelves, etc. When using IP recognition a user would usually have to provider more PII (personally identifiable information) and manually sign-in to each site separately.

Question 2

How do you manage smaller vendors that only publish one journal title?

Accepted Answer

In addition to federated SSO OpenAthens offers a managed proxy service, our complete solution, to allow us to support access for resources where the publisher/vendor hasn’t yet implemented federated SSO.

Question 3

How do we know if we ought to stop allocating the proxy resource or if we should continue allocating both the federated and the proxy?

Accepted Answer

When a publisher joins the OpenAthens federation, we ask affected customers to update their links by a certain date and then remove the proxy resource. So only the federated resource would remain in your resource catalogue. 

Your OpenAthens support provider can assist if you have further questions.

Question 4

Where can I find a list of federated institutions?

Accepted Answer

OpenAthens maintains a listing of institutional members.

GÉANT maintains a listing of all federations and their members.

In theory, where an institution and a publisher/vendor are in the same federation, they can access the resources provided by that vendor (as long as they have a subscription). Each institution manages listings/catalogues of their subscriptions.

Question 5

What are the challenges in a statewide deployment of a single sign-on experience for the use of electronic database resources?

Accepted Answer

The OpenAthens community includes statewide consortia such as GALILEO (Georgia Library Learning Online). We have many helpful resources on this.

FAQ

How can we help?

What can federated single sign-on do that IP authentication with VPN can't?

How do you manage smaller vendors that only publish one journal title?

How do we know if we ought to stop allocating the proxy resource or if we should continue allocating both the federated and the proxy?

Where can I find a list of federated institutions?

What are the challenges in a statewide deployment of a single sign-on experience for the use of electronic database resources?