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

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Accessing resources

    Showing 15 of 99

    Allocate a list of resources via file upload

    While it would be great to export a list of resources currently allocated to a Permission Set (see IDP-I-45), it would also help if we could do the reverse and allocate resources by way of a file upload (such as .CSV). Then we could basically "cop...
    about 2 months ago in Librarians / Accessing resources / Resource catalogue / User accounts and permission sets 0 Research & discovery

    Ability for the Redirector to double-encode the target URL

    Some publishers have a complicated linking syntax with many layers of information, and in order to fully preserve the original target URL throughout the journey, it must be encoded more than once. For example, Bloomsbury Digital Resources. This {t...
    about 2 months ago in Librarians / Accessing resources / Redirector 0 Research & discovery

    A way to add alternative organisation names for use in discovery

    My users know their organisation by many acronyms and abbreviations. It'd be great if there were a way to add these to the find-my-organisation search.
    4 months ago in Librarians / Accessing resources / Org discovery (Wayfinder) 1 Feedback wanted

    Prioritize/Rank/Re-order OpenAthens Federation results in Wayfinder institutional discovery search

    If an institution has membership in multiple federations (such as OpenAthens and InCommon), when a library patron searches for their institution name in an OpenAthens Wayfinder "Find your institution" search, they will see multiple results that al...
    4 months ago in Librarians / Accessing resources / Org discovery (Wayfinder) 1 Feedback wanted

    Create a separate login page that is not connected to SAML for other types of users

    We do not want to turn on the landing page that makes our patrons choose how to authenticate bc most of the time we are using SAML. We would like a separate log in page for guest accounts to use for community patrons, vendors, and alumni.
    6 months ago in Librarians / Accessing resources / Library/web portal / MyAthens 3 Feedback wanted

    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...
    7 months ago in Librarians / Accessing resources / Overall usability  / Terminology 0 Feedback wanted

    Improve support for DOI links within the OpenAthens Redirector

    We have been having issues linking to content from Sage vis the OpenAthens Redirector. This is due to the OpenAthens Redirector not honouring the URL registered against the DOI reference (e.g. As an example you can use the Crossref API to look at ...
    7 months ago in Librarians / Accessing resources / Redirector 2 Research & discovery

    Change the messaging on the log in screen around the link to reset openathens password from problems logging in to Reset your password/ Register

    Problems logging in seems to be not specific enough for our users. We are getting tickets opened on our help desk looking to reset openathens passwords, when the user should be able to do this themselves. Additionally, this text does not convey th...
    7 months ago in Librarians / Accessing resources 0 Feedback wanted

    MyAthens URL with embedded Access Account logins

    We are looking for a MyAthens access URL that includes the username and password embedded into it. This access URL would be shared with users that are on-site using the Access Account(the MD account that requires you to be on a registered IP). Thi...
    9 months ago in Librarians / Accessing resources / Library/web portal / MyAthens / User accounts and permission sets 0 Research & discovery

    OA Redirector: Allow access mechanism selection.

    We use OpenAthens and the OpenAthens Proxy.The Redirector will always use Federated access whenever it's available. Some resources do not work well with Federated access, which is why we Proxy them.e.g. Some do not allow deep linking through their...
    10 months ago in Librarians / Accessing resources / Proxy / Redirector 0 Research & discovery