Question 1

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 2

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 3

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 4

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.

Question 5

We use IP recognition and/or organizational username/passwords to enable access – isn’t that enough?

Accepted Answer

IP recognition tools and organizational username/passwords are poor substitutes for federated access management. These access methods are inherently insecure and can’t provide users with personalization features. To enable personalization, users would need to create a personal account with each publishing platform they want to access which creates another barrier to usage. It’s also more difficult to identify misuse or provide any kind of meaningful statistics as IP only recognizes the organization, not individual users.

FAQ

How can we help?

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?

We use IP recognition and/or organizational username/passwords to enable access – isn’t that enough?