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.

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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.


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Status Research & discovery
Workspace Librarians
Categories Activating resources Resource catalogue
Created by Guest
Created on Feb 7, 2025

RELATED IDEAS

Keep a change log for allocated resources in the catalogue

Currently in the resources catalogue, there is very little information available to an institution outside of the resource details.

It would be really helpful to have an additional tab on each resource where the system records any changes applied to the resource by an institution, the date they occurred and which admin account actioned them. For example:

  • When a resource was first allocated.

  • What group/s were allocated/unallocated by a change.

  • If a Link format is updated, a record of what the previous Link format was.

  • Categories adjusted

By recording this information, it allows users to see relevant history related to the resources in their catalogue, allowing people to understand what has changed and when. This can aid trouble shooting and general ongoing management of the resources.

Is this currently impacting your ability to use OpenAthens effectively? No
Idea type Something new
  • Attach files
  • Guest
    Jul 15, 2026

    Coming back again to say I would really like this feature.

    We're experiencing a situation where we were told a federated resource would be allocated by OpenAthens and no action was required by us (as part of a change on the publisher's side from proxied to federated access). The federated resource was not allocated in our catalogue and we did not identify this until a few months later.

    EBSCO Support have told us the allocation script ran successfully, but they cannot provide more details due to a lack of detailed logs. We now have no confidence that this kind of error won't be repeated, because we don't know how it happened.

    A change log for resources might have addressed this concern.

    Reply
  • Guest
    Jun 23, 2025

    Would be nice if the domains included in a resource were more easily readable and we didn't have to hover over them to see them (thinking of Oxford resources in particular). I would like to just have the text visible when viewing a resource. If only one or two domains is included it is easy to read but when not it requires some very careful hoovering to read the domains.


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  • Guest
    May 20, 2025

    This would be really useful, especially because we've had some instances where we've been unsure what changes EBSCO Support have made.

    Reply