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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

My votes

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"
over 1 year ago in Librarians / Overall usability 0 Research & discovery

Allow searching by username in Reports Dashboard

Sometimes when we have a user who has reported an issue, or we're waiting for a user to test out accessing a particular resource, we want to be able to check on their activity via OpenAthens Reports Dashboard. If the user is not in the top number ...
10 months ago in Librarians 0 Feedback wanted

OrgID-level linking, create links to a specific sub-org

Currently, all OpenAthens linking seems to be based on the Entity ID. This means that sub-orgs who do not have their own Entity ID (and instead inherit it from their Domain) have no choice but to navigate through the login journey starting at the ...
6 months ago in Librarians / Org information 0 Feedback wanted

Video for students

create a video for students about what OA is and how to use it
over 1 year ago in Librarians / Accessing resources 1 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...
4 months ago in Librarians / Org information / Overall usability  / User accounts and permission sets 0 Feedback wanted

Request to make First Name and Last Name non-mandatory for Bulk Upload

Currently, when we bulk upload personal accounts in the OpenAthens admin, both First Name and Last Name are mandatory. In some cases, it is difficult to export users' forenames and surnames separately. If either First Name or Last Name (or both...
about 1 year ago in Librarians / User accounts and permission sets 4 Research & discovery

Share statistical report edited as we can see on administrators dashboard

The statistical reports we can view in Reporting would ideally be exportable in their edited format, exactly as we administrators see them on the platform, so that they can be shared with others. It is unfortunate and a significant drawback that w...
over 1 year ago in Librarians / Reporting 0 Research & discovery

The ability to assign on-prem IP ranges to permission sets

We have our system configured to allow access to resources without authentication if the user is on a pair of recognized, on-prem, IP ranges. This works for most resources; however we have a few resources that are restricted to one IP range only. ...
over 1 year ago in Librarians / User accounts and permission sets 2 Research & discovery

Change the term "Active" on accounts to mean Active

It turns out that when an account is displayed as "Active" it doesn't mean it is actually active (being used), just that the user has set a password. This is so counter intuitive that I suspect it's not just all of my colleagues (and me) who misun...
over 1 year ago in Librarians / Terminology 1 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...
5 months ago in Librarians / Org information / Overall usability  / User accounts and permission sets 0 Feedback wanted