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 Org information
Created by Guest
Created on Feb 24, 2025

RELATED IDEAS

Configurable html message or external link for resource not configured error. Option for notification

When you used the OpenAthens redirector on a resource that's not configured and active an error page is displayed to the patron. this message / page can't currently be modified.

It would be nice that we could add details and links to external systems here (or have the error redirect to an external site).

The option to have that error email admins would also be helpful, letting is know what resource isn't configured that our patron thinks should be, or obtained a link from some associated system.

Is this currently impacting your ability to use OpenAthens effectively? Yes
Idea type Something to improve
  • Attach files
  • Guest
    Jul 30, 2025

    Agreed.

    Reply
  • Guest
    Jul 29, 2025

    I couldn't agree more. We need more flexibility and customization.

    Reply
  • Guest
    Jul 29, 2025

    I agree, if the list can't be filtered on configured institutions (ideal) for a resource, then please allow for more visibility of what is being requested and from what platform/URL.

    Reply
  • Guest
    Jul 23, 2025

    We are going live with OpenAthens in two weeks and it is important to us that users can contact their administrator when they reach this page. Most users are not familiar with the intricacies of authentication and library resources, and many will reach this page and have no idea why - especially in our first semester, when faculty are athenizing every link they have, including open access and publicly available ones that we haven't/can't configure in OpenAthens. This will result in a lot of frustration for our users. We would like to see this error page included in the list of customizable pages, or at least the Contact Administrator link go to a page where they can choose their institution and get our contact information (right now that link goes to a 'reset password' page which is puzzling and will add to the user's confusion, as we're using strictly SSO accounts).

    Please consider bumping this enhancement up the priority list. Thank you.

    Reply
  • Guest
    Jun 23, 2025

    Agreed. Adding support request for OA-AP-4001-03 Unable to process this SAML.

    We get these e-mails when users find a resource with "Sign in through your institution" when a resource is not configured they get this error and contact us. We end up fielding a lot of "why don't I have access to this" for resources we do not have configured in our OA catalog.

    It would be nice if there was some sort of check on if a resources is configured for a product when the list for institutions is presented to users. For example if only University A and B are configured for a resource, only those should show up on the institution pick list instead of University A and B and C and D.



    Reply
  • Guest
    Apr 11, 2025

    Agreed. I would also like to have the message for error code OA-AP-4032-1 ("The user has not been granted access to this resource. Restrictive mode is enabled for your organization.") show the link that the user is trying to get to.

    This is currently frustrating my coworkers to no end because we need to know which specific article is desired in order to troubleshoot (is it from a journal we subscribe to or not? do we have holdings for that year or not? etc).

    It seems to me that OpenAthens already knows what the target URL is, because the link resolver has to send it to OpenAthens in order to have OpenAthens redirect the user there. So hopefully it would be as relatively simple as configuring the error message to show data that is already there.

    Reply