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

All ideas

    Request to support non-standard ports (e.g. 8080) on the proxy.

    Currently the OpenAthens proxy supports only standard HTTP/HTTPS ports (80 and 443). Some customers have locally hosted resources running on non-standard ports, for example http://www.domain.com:8080, which cannot be supported yet.
    about 1 month ago in Librarians / Accessing resources / Proxy 0 Feedback wanted

    Error Message details too scary

    For the error message "We are sorry that we cannot complete your request", I'm requesting a rephrasing so it clearer and it's not anxiety inducing. It can be reproduced by using the OpenAthens bookmark to a non-configured site such as google.com. ...
    4 months ago in Librarians / Terminology 0 Feedback wanted

    Layout of "Contact your organization" window of error message

    The layout of the window that opens when clicking on "Contact your organization" on an error message is not UX friendly. The current layout is vertical and does not take up the whole screen, so the user has to scroll to see the whole message, the ...
    3 months ago in Librarians / OpenAthens support  / Terminology 1 Feedback wanted

    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. ...
    almost 2 years ago in Librarians / User accounts and permission sets 2 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.
    about 1 year ago in Librarians / Accessing resources / Org discovery (Wayfinder) 1 Feedback wanted

    Ability to specify encryption method for custom SAML resources

    It seems OpenAthens uses the encryption method AES-128-CBC by default. But some publishers require a different encryption method instead, such as AES-256-GCM. Publishers can force OpenAthens to use a certain method by specifying it in their SP met...
    3 months ago in Librarians / Proxy / Redirector 0 Feedback wanted

    Allow OpenAthens to dynamically apply Permission Sets based on a user's access location (on-campus or off-campus network).

    Many institutions manage electronic resource access under licence agreements that distinguish between on-campus and off-campus use. At our institution, some user groups are permitted to access only a subset of resources remotely, while additional ...
    about 2 months ago in Librarians / Accessing resources / Attribute release / 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...
    almost 2 years ago in Librarians / Overall usability  / User accounts and permission sets 3 Research & discovery

    Notifications when critical updates are required (SSL, Squid, No Connection)

    Currently, OpenAthens relies heavily on e-mail notifications for critical updates, and in sophisticated or consortial configuration, there are issues that may be missed at scale. It would be helpful if any critical item was flagged with a notifica...
    3 months ago in Librarians / Accessing resources / Proxy 0 Feedback wanted

    IPv6 support for OpenAthens

    We were notified by a few vendors that their platform now relies on IPv6 for access while OpenAthens currently supports IPv4 only and have no plans to implement it at this time. This creates access failures as more vendors and networks transition ...
    10 months ago in Librarians / Accessing resources / Proxy 1 Feedback wanted