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.
OpenAthens lists these vendors as compatible providers, and the vendor benefits from the use. To me, this establishes a relationship and a support obligation for OpenAthens and the vendor, even if not contractual--as OpenAthens has presented the option to their customer as a means to connect to vendors that might otherwise be imcompatible, and allowed use of their platform by the vendor for this purpose. After updating more than 200 custom SAML resources at the last ten year change, I sincerely hope that a--more vendors are in the Fed by the time this happens again or b--the process runs far more smoothly and with a much higher degree of information and/or automation than last time. Also, EBSCO/OpenAthens need to be far more transparent about this at the sales point. It would not have been a showstopper, but our staff would have been far more prepared.
A simple first step would be a user warning in the OpenAthens admin area that any custom SAML connection is dependent on the publisher, not OpenAthens, to fix. "Tick this box to acknowledge the risk". OpenAthens has no direct or contractual relationship with the publisher if they are not in the federation. We will used best endeavours to fix any problems, but it is the library that manages that relationship making it difficult for OpenAthens to engage.