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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

Status Research & discovery
Workspace Librarians
Created by Guest
Created on Oct 23, 2025

Ability to obtain eduPersonTargetedIDs for users

OpenAthens generates a unique eduPersonTargetedID value for each user. That attribute is frequently used to create personal user accounts with SAML-based SPs. It's how SPs remember the user on subsequent logins so they can pair them with their saved content.

However, over time, when there are changes on the IdP side (for example, changing the local IdP from Azure to Okta, or discontinuing the old GUID attribute in favor of a new one), it can result in OpenAthens generating new eduPersonTargetedIDs for users. Similarly, changes on the SP end can require a new attribute for personalization purposes (for example, updating SSO settings on the SP side to accommodate a new product). In either case, some sort of migration is often necessary in order to maintain access to personal accounts after the changes to their attributes.

But in order for SPs to migrate user accounts, the SPs typically need a list of old vs. new identifiers for each user so they can update their accounts accordingly. Such a list is not obtainable through OpenAthens Admin. Would it be possible to make this data available in OpenAthens Admin?

Is this currently impacting your ability to use OpenAthens effectively? No
Idea type Ease of use of specific or groups of tasks/actions, Time saver, Something to improve
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