OpenAthens Ideas Portal

We're always looking for ways to improve our products, and we'd love your input to help us make that happen. Your suggestions will guide us in deciding where we should focus our future research and development.

Just sign in with your email to share your thoughts or vote for ideas you like—it'll help them get noticed!


Here’s how the portal is organised:

  • Librarians (Identity Providers): Share ideas that help organisations that manage user identities and provide access to online content and services. This includes improving the experience for students and researchers.

  • Publishers (Service Providers): Share ideas for organisations that offer content and services.


Guidance on using this portal

ADD A NEW IDEA

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Overall usability

    Showing 15 of 105

    The Authentication "Holy Grail": Collaborate Toward a Means for Users to Access Content Across Multiple Affiliations

    As OpenAthens gains marketshare in the library authentication landscape, it has become highly likely, especially in consortial environments, that a library user may belong to 2 or more organizations that use OpenAthens as the primary means of auth...
    18 days ago in Librarians / Accessing resources / Library/web portal / MyAthens / Org discovery (Wayfinder) / Overall usability 0 Feedback wanted

    Timestamps reflecting local time zone

    It would be helpful to have timestamps in the admin dashboard reflect the institution's local time zone, rather than automatically deferring to GMT.
    about 1 year ago in Librarians / Org information / Overall usability  / Reporting 0 Research & discovery

    Provide a link from the Reports dashboard back to the Admin dashboard

    In the Admin dashboard I often click Statistics > Reporting to get to the reporting dashboard. But I haven't found a way to get back to the Admin dashboard. Please either provide a link back to the main Admin dashboard, or in the Admin menu, op...
    about 1 year ago in Librarians / Overall usability  / Search and navigation 2 Research & discovery

    Improve "Save" UX across multiple features and functionality, but especially with suborg mapping

    This problem is frequent across the OpenAthens admin landscape, but it is especially cumbersome in Connections>Organizations>Mapping. In the context of our consortium, we have 60 public libraries on a single connection. Those suborgs are map...
    about 1 month ago in Librarians / Org information / Overall usability  / User accounts and permission sets 0 Feedback wanted

    Export a list of all resources assigned to a certain permission set

    If I want to get a list of all resources assigned to a certain group of users, I can do a search and see the tiles listed on-screen, but I can't export a list of them. Would be great to be able to export lists like this simply eg as a csv, to make...
    about 1 year ago in Librarians / Overall usability  / User accounts and permission sets 3 Research & discovery

    Longer-lasting sessions/cookies

    1. Make the "Access code" requrement take much longer to re-appear (months instead of weeks). Being required to wait for this code so often is disruptive to workflow. At least IP-validate on site like it once did. 2. Make the session times much lo...
    about 1 year ago in Librarians / Administrators / Overall usability 4 Research & discovery

    When OpenAthens sub-org inherits local authentication connector, enable Default Permission Set by default

    Typically, when creating a local authentication connector such as SAML, the Permissions tab starts out with the Default permission set automatically enabled. This is consistent with the documentation at https://docs.openathens.net/libraries/permis...
    about 2 months ago in Librarians / Org information / Overall usability  / User accounts and permission sets 0 Feedback wanted

    Users' activity tab timestamp

    For very recent activity, this shows a timestamp as "A minute ago" or "3 minutes ago". This sort of relative time is not useful! Please give these entries a proper timestamp, e.g. "12 December 2023 at 11:12"
    about 1 year ago in Librarians / Overall usability 0 Research & discovery

    Snapshot Feature for Rapid Rollback

    , I would like to propose an additional feature to further improve system recovery and minimize service disruptions caused by human errors. To facilitate quick rollback and resolution, we request the implementation of automatic system snapshots ta...
    10 months ago in Librarians / Administrators / Overall usability 0 Research & discovery

    Users receive non relevant errors messages

    For example a user when changing password received a 'invalid activation code' message. It didn't explain to the user what they had done wrong. Another example a user was renewing their account and got the password word wrong they received the mes...
    8 months ago in Librarians / Accessing resources / Overall usability  / Terminology 0 Feedback wanted