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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 Actioned
Workspace Publishers
Created by Guest
Created on Jul 21, 2026

Documentation with Detailed Instructions for Publishers to Whitelist OpenAthens in their Cloudflare Security Settings

These days, many publishers are using security products such as Cloudflare, and they end up blocking the OpenAthens proxy server at least once for each new OpenAthens customer. This creates extra work to contact those publishers and request that they un-block OpenAthens. However, many publishers are not equipped to make security changes in Cloudflare all by themselves, and they oftentimes struggle with requests to allow certain OpenAthens domains/IPs. Publishers (especially smaller ones without massive IT departments) need detailed, step-by-step instructions that say exactly where to paste the OpenAthens proxy domains and IPs.

OpenAthens currently has a tiny blurb at the bottom of https://docs.openathens.net/libraries/about-the-managed-proxy-service but this is lacking because it does not tell publishers where to go in their Cloudflare configuration. Could OpenAthens please provide publishers with more detail in regards to fixing Cloudflare errors, even if it's simply offering links to the relevant Cloudflare support site documentation?

Is this currently impacting your ability to use OpenAthens effectively? Yes
  • Attach files
  • Admin
    Sarah Underwood
    Jul 23, 2026

    Thank you for raising this to our attention. The docs page has been updated to include some more information about if the publisher is using Cloudflare (or other similar products).