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.
This is an urgent necessity for many institutions. I see this branching into possibly two enhancements. The first would simply allow institutions that do not use local OpenAthens accounts to bypass this selection page. (I've assumed that this was already possible, but apparently not?) The second would allow institutions to designate one login method as primary and thus this page would be bypassed under normal circumstances. A unique URL would then be designated for each alternative login method, which could be shared with the users who need that method.
I like the idea of letting an organization choose to bypass the option to select the organization. There's another entity using a similar name to ours and it can cause confusion.
Comment from listserv:
That’s not an issue for us as it helps when the users have access to multiple collections because they work for us but study with someone else etc. I always teach them that OA is like a front door and behind every door you have different orgs resources.
Comment from listserv thread:
Stop mucking about with getting users to select their organisation, and make everything WAYFless. The correct authentication is already built in to the OpenAthens username, so there is no need to get people to select an organisation.
Comment from listserv thread:
Well of course some libraries need to offer the choice screen because they are using one OpenAthens instance for multiple user groups/institutional affiliations.
But perhaps adding functionality to let an organization choose to bypass that choice screen OR one URL for institutional login and one for OpenAthens account logins as an account setting. 99% of our access is institutional login but we do sometimes need OpenAthens logins for support or outlier users.