Overview

Mark Allen publishes academic, professional and consumer titles in healthcare, business, agriculture, finance, music and education. Their readership is global, accessing content via a mix of self-built and third-party platforms. The group’s business-to-business and consumer titles have their own websites, some of which are available to all while others have some form of access management.

“For these titles we have an access and entitlement system that we built ourselves to OpenID standards,” explains Tom Pollard, the group’s publishing director for digital resources.

“The publishing platforms we use for our academic publications typically have their own integration with OpenAthens. But we are seeing a significant amount of readership crossover. For example, our magazine Gramophone attracts interest from academia as well as music buffs among the general public.

“In cases like this where readers use personal logins we may also need to add their institutional logins and we may use third-party identity management services to manage things. These services also often have an integration with OpenAthens to enable flexible single sign-on.”

Consistent login experience

While there are various methods of granting access, from an end user’s perspective it’s pretty seamless. However, the company wanted to simplify their processes to save time and cost. Doing so, they reasoned, could enable single sign-on across the publications to further streamline the customer experience. It would also free up staff time to focus on developing new features that enhance user experience and to create unique, inspiring content.

Solution

Tom says the in-house development team is now making integrations directly with OpenAthens.

“We use the same open standards as OpenAthens and we’ve worked with the organization for 15 years. It has steadily become simpler to do, and with OpenAthens Keystone flexible, secure single sign-on is even easier.”

The group will integrate OpenAthens into its own authentication systems gradually as websites are updated. So far, two websites have the OpenAthens integration – leading weekly title Farmers Weekly and the newly launched BJN Inform. Both have readers using academic/institutional and personal credentials and the integration means a consistent login experience.

Benefits

“It also means we can make efficiency savings because greater consistency means fewer support queries and we have to do less in-house work on updates.”

This is because some third-party providers need their customers to carry out aspects of service developments for themselves. As a fully managed, cloud-based service OpenAthens takes care of all updates and maintenance.

Issue

The library is running a long-term study on the correlation between engagement with its resources and undergraduate student outcomes. To this end, it has been measuring multiple points of engagement consistently for more than six years. But, in a library with about 1.4 million e-books, 212,000 journals and more than 450 databases, that’s a lot of data to process.

Challenge

Until last year, as part of this study, they had scripts on their server pulling monthly statistics from the OpenAthens Reporting API as CSV files. Once each term, the assessment team within the library set aside several days to process the individual files for each OpenAthens resource.

Solution

Enter the proof-of-concept enhancements to the Reporting API. The familiar, aggregated data is still provided, but the tool can now give access to raw authentication and resource usage data. That means the library has more granular detail about specific times, locations, identifiers, activities and other reportable attributes. Personally identifiable information (PII) remains completely secure.

Even better, the enhancements make it possible to automate report downloads and combine all this data with other institutional information. It integrates seamlessly with business intelligence tools such as Microsoft’s Power BI and Tableau, the tool used by the J. Murrey Atkins Library.

Happily, the library found it quite simple to get started with receiving the raw data. Curtis Kularski is the IT manager for academic affairs. He told us:

“We wrote a PHP script and established a cron scheduling command on our server to fetch and process the data on a daily basis. The script was easy to write and based on our previous code for OpenAthens data.

“The script opens a curl connection, places the request to the API, then loops every 30 seconds until the file is ready. Once the file is ready it is retrieved and inserted into a database table. The database view we built for the library staff makes it easy to match up classifications for various user groups based on their affiliations, etc.”

The library started pulling in data within two days of being given access to the reporting API. It generates about 90,000 records each month, and the system runs the script daily in the early hours, taking just seconds to pull the latest data in.

Benefits

As we’ve seen, the new Reporting API saves staff huge amounts of time and provides cleaned, ready to use data in near-real time.

Collections staff in the library use the aggregated data to understand how different resources are being used and by which types of user groups.

The assessment team headed by Becky Croxton is focused squarely on the raw data, and it is giving evidence of something very powerful. She explains:

“It is helping us market the importance of this engagement at faculty meetings, within the library, and in information literacy instruction and research sessions.”

Issue

‘Don’t post your videos. Publish them’ says Cadmore Media’s website. The company provides a media management and streaming service that enables scholarly and professional organizations to publish their video and audio assets, boosting their discovery, accessibility and engagement. More than 30 learned societies and publishers in the UK and US rely on Cadmore to increase the reach and impact of their content. 

And while streaming may be relatively new for scholarly content, publishers of video and audio content have concerns about access management that are very familiar. 

Solution

In many cases, Cadmore delivers content to be hosted on an existing webpage and streamed from there. In this case, user authentication can be taken care of without Cadmore’s involvement. But increasingly, the company is building dedicated sites for media content. When it does so, Cadmore uses a novel multi-layered approach to access management that piqued our interest here at OpenAthens.  

“Often, it’ll be their society’s member database that we check against. But it could be their events system, if the user attended an event that gave them permission to access the resulting resources. Or perhaps the requested content is linked to a proceedings journal. In that case, we can poll the journal platform’s authentication system to check if their institution has subscribed to it. We give users a choice about how they want to log in. ” 

“If all these can’t help, we can authenticate through OpenAthens. And so while our use of OpenAthens is low, it actually fulfils a very important role for us.” 

Simon says that Cadmore’s approach to identity management for most of its publisher customers “does not require that we host the authoritative view of authentication and permissions for any given site.” 

Into the future

The Cadmore team are seeing the use of video for scholarly communication becoming more common. 

“The shift towards video is inevitable, so societies and publishers will want to embrace it,” says Simon. “We’re building more websites, including some where societies want us to play a more central role in authenticating users. This will change how we use OpenAthens, and its characteristics like security features, reach, reporting and end user privacy will become a sales point for us.”  

Issue

As a mental health, community health and social care organization MPFT’s health and care professionals work mostly in the community, sometimes many miles from ‘base’. And although the trust has an extensive library of journals and other resources, most of which are online, users had to remember a separate password to log in to access them. Frustrating for them – and time-wasting for library staff who had to help resolve difficulties.

Challenge

As part of a trust-wide digital transformation program the library asked the digital services team for a single sign-on solution to improve security, simplify access and so improve user experience and patient care.

Digital service development manager Kevin Pugh wanted a solution that was easy to implement and didn’t need another server or the costs that would come with it. Like many NHS organizations MPFT’s cloud platform is Microsoft Azure.  Kevin realized that, like many public cloud platforms, Azure makes it easy to deploy OpenAthens as an Azure enterprise application with Azure Active Directory integration and enable single sign-on.

We told him another NHS trust had already followed a similar route. A quick call to Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust confirmed deployment is straightforward for NHS organizations. The main consideration is the onboarding and management of accounts and subsequent licenses, which is managed using the administrative tools within the solution.

Solution

Deployment is an easy process for NHS organizations because OpenAthens manages the hard work. For example, on the library’s behalf, we liaise with resource providers to make sure authentication details are changed to ensure a seamless transition for users.

MPFT found it helpful to build a test environment and check everything before go-live, to avoid surprises. Kevin built it on his smartphone in minutes, while also answering emails and sorting out his admin.

Benefits

Librarian Lisa Basini says the switch to single sign-on was “an instant positive. Users say it makes their job so much easier”.

The trust’s 10,000+ staff and other authorized library users can now find what they need anytime and anywhere with a wifi connection.

The library’s systems are more secure because access is granted via single sign-on plus multi-factor authentication (MFA). Library staff save time on sorting access issues and users rarely forget their sign-on details. But if they do, the digital service team have set up automated password reset.

During the first 11 months MPFT statistics show a reduction in the failure rate (incorrect passwords, expired accounts etc) from around 20% before single sign-on with OpenAthens, to under 1%!

Before you go, have a look at  how Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust are improving user experience with their local directory integration

Issue

NHS Wales has used OpenAthens for over twenty years to authorize access to the NHS Wales e-Library for Health. The e-Library is the go-to resource for the nation’s ten health boards and NHS trusts as well as dentists, ambulance services, community pharmacies, hospices, researchers, students on placement and Welsh Government departments.

But when these users worked away from their employers’ settings, reliance on IP authentication meant they spent time signing in multiple times and got frustrated trying to remember numerous passwords and sign-in protocols for content providers.

Challenge

The Welsh Government has an ambitious digital health and social care strategy and it has created Digital Health and Care Wales (DHCW) to initiate digital innovations that improve care.

DHCW librarian specialist John Dunkley-Williams was tasked with improving access to the e-Library for Health so every accredited user (almost 100,000 in all) could use the e-Library’s resources quickly, reliably and more securely simply by signing in just once, using their NHS Wales credentials.

Solution

Because the OpenAthens SAML-based single sign-on solution is cloud-based the technical aspects of implementation are straightforward for large, complex organizations. They don’t need to invest time and resources in in-house development work.

“The key thing we needed was organization mapping,” says John. “Our infrastructure team had already mapped the local directory systems in sub organizations across NHS Wales. We mirrored these in the local directory set-up we created for the new OpenAthens single sign-on solution.”

John’s team and OpenAthens designed the implementation and conducted rigorous testing to make sure the solution was secure, protecting both user privacy and patient confidentiality.

“NHS governance and procurement processes took some set-up time and the solution was technically built and ready to go ahead of schedule,” says John.

Frustratingly for the organization, the short wait created a glitch because one of their security certificates expired during the pause. So at the planned go-live the connection broke, but it was an easy fix.

John explains:

Benefits

E-Library users can now access resources faster wherever they are and whatever device they are using, simply by using their regular work login details. The quick training videos created by DHCW sold library users on the idea and NHS Wales’ use of OpenAthens increased by 33% within the first month of the single sign-on launch.

The NHS Wales project has involved one of the largest local directory integrations that OpenAthens has ever seen and it’s about to get bigger. DHCW is in the process of extending single sign-on to social care workers – and they shared their experiences with NHS Scotland to help them plan a glitch-free upgrade to their own single sign-on solution.

“The support from OpenAthens makes a daunting-looking task very do-able,” says John. “We had a dedicated technician who was available to help whenever we asked.

Overview

To support the research needs of 5,000 students and faculty members, through the four libraries in the 3 campuses, the university library maintains a robust collection containing 45,000 print volumes; 500 e-books; 500 periodicals, and subscriptions to more than 50,000 e-journals via database. The library also subscribes to a variety of databases including MEDLINE Complete, Business Source Premier, and CINAHL Plus with Full Text.

Recently, to improve remote access to its resources and improve its ability to capture accurate usage statistics, the library purchased OpenAthens through EBSCO.

Challenges

Prior to purchasing OpenAthens, Jerusalem College of Technology used VPN/Proxy system to grant access to the library’s resources. However, the system became sluggish over the years, and it became difficult to access databases, long page-load times created frustration and uncertainty for library users. Plus, users were getting out of the databases many times.

“We knew that we had a problem with the VPN/Proxy system, and we tried to solve it, but it was not possible. We needed something new to provide a positive experience for users,” said Janna Gorelick, Library Manager at Jerusalem College of Technology.

In addition, it was very difficult to obtain usage statistics. The library didn’t have a way to look at statistics without asking IT.

Solutions

Gorelick said that as soon as they understood they needed a new system to offer a streamlined user experience, she asked her colleagues in other libraries in Israel which product they were using. All of them answered OpenAthens and were very happy about the product and the fast and brilliant support provided by EBSCO.

“We already subscribed to several EBSCO Databases for many years, so it was quite natural to add another resource. Plus, we have a good relationship with the local team made of hard workers. We purchased OpenAthens in January 2022, and the implementation project started in February” said Gorelick.

Benefits & Results

Now, users will not waste their time logging in to resources. After the first log-in through a QR code provided by the library, users can easily access all databases without being rejected or making multiple logins.

A result of this easier workflow is an increase in database usage. Gorelick said “students are accessing more often to databases from home because they saw it is easy! Plus, the library is receiving fewer emails related to issues with opening documents. This is great because librarians can now focus on other activities.”

August and September are quiet periods for students; however, since October, Gorelick showed a big increase in statistics. Now, there are 500 new users, and every day there are around 40 unique users with 10-20 new users. The big season is at the end of the year, Gorelick explained that they expect those numbers will double by the end of the year.

For healthcare professionals (HCPs) making decisions on patient care, time is too precious to waste it looking through pages of content for the latest thinking on best practice. They need to get straight to what they’re looking for. And now they can, because  BMJ Best Practice resources come with deep linking capabilities.

Issue

BMJ Best Practice is a clinical decision support tool, provided via a website and an app and relied on by HCPs worldwide. It gives detailed information on best practice in more than 1,000 conditions across 32 clinical specialties. That all adds up to many, MANY pages of content. And it could mean a whole lot of scrolling if the content provider can’t verify a practitioner’s right to access content when they’re using single sign-on resource’s homepage rather than the URL they need. All in all, an unsatisfactory user experience (UX).

Challenge

To remove this frustration NHS Wales and Health Education England wanted to deploy the OpenAthens Redirector tool, which can redirect requests to publishers’ WAYFless links and get users straight to the content they want. However, BMJ platforms did not support deep linking, which is a pre-requisite.

Solution

BMJ’s team were keen to work with us on a solution to meet their subscribers’ requirements. So – enter Sylwia Zientek, one of our application support analysts. She supported BMJ throughout the deep linking implementation.

Publishers like BMJ who use our service provider software Keystone enjoy the benefits of its WAYFless functionality out of the box; adding a cookie handling code gives deep linking functionality and ensures the platform is accessible via links from the Redirector.

In BMJ’s case, adding the deep linking capability was complicated by the fact that part of the platform is managed by a third party. It has hundreds of domains as well as two configuration consoles to take care of.

“The key was to check in with the publisher regularly to offer advice and help,” says Sylwia.

“With the service ticket kept open for the length of the project I was able to share recommendations, test the developed features as we went along and enable the deep linking feature without any hitches.”

Benefits

“OpenAthens took care of the heavy lifting over a few months in late 2022 and then we just had to spend a couple of days setting up the configuration in our service provider portal,” says Chris Phipps. “At BMJ we work with many partners and it always works best when someone at the partner organization is committed to working collaboratively. Sylwia is that person. She was a listening ear and a constant support. Without her, I doubt we would have achieved this enhanced solution for our users so speedily.”

The Oxford Academic platform features over 500 journals and 40,000 academic book titles and on average is accessed by OpenAthens Federation users more than 102,000 times each month.

The issue

The Oxford University Press team wanted to implement a new access control system for its Oxford Academic platform.

The project had to ensure:

• the new target could be tested without interruption to the production service
• the existing integrations with publisher platforms Silverchair and HighWire could be tested at every stage
• delivery of a seamless transition from SGK to OIDC backed authentication for OpenAthens proxy as well as from the existing SAML service provider to the new one.

All of this had to be transparent to users with no interruptions to service availability.

We started working with Oxford University Press in early November 2021, and the project completed on 24 January 2022 with a successful platform migration.

Challenges

Rebecca Sharp (Delivery Manager at Oxford University Press) was undertaking a significant upgrade of the technology. She knew the project required detailed communication between separate platform providers as well as an external view of the pre-release target. The ability to test, retest and to implement flexibility around key timings for the project were also key. The migration date and other key milestones needed to be flexible, as did the team overseeing them.

A key consideration for Oxford University Press was the complexity of the data transfer. There was no room for data gaps or loss, and the client required a developer view to validate Silverchair and HighWire updates. Providing the client with test proxy targets and user accounts was also crucial to ensure everything was in the right place.

The significant scale of the project meant every aspect needed to come together at the right time, with no disruption to access to content for the OpenAthens users reliant on accessing information. The team overseeing the transition needed to be in regular communication and fully accessible during the D-day switchover.

Rebecca explains:

Solutions

Our team offered the benefit of a team of SAML experts to help oversee the project and ensure each element could be tested in turn. The team also provided on-demand availability of its 2nd-line expert support on D-Day to oversee three key requirements. These were:

1. updating the Federation metadata at the right time
2. switching access for all OpenAthens IdPs in the resource catalogue
3. offering rollback options if required at any stage.

Rebecca continues:  

Benefits and results

Oxford University Press already had the benefit of single sign-on for multiple resources and a personalised dashboard for resource management, also benefiting from reporting toto highlight priority accounts and content. Working with OpenAthens enabled them to provide a seamless transition of access for OpenAthens users, with a new interface being the only visible sign to most customers that any change had occurred. The consistency of communication and ability to outsourcing heavy lifting, data migration planning and testing provided reassurance to the Oxford University Press team.  

Rebecca adds:

Overview

Until recently, AAP offered their resources via two vendors. Customers were accessing both platforms via OpenAthens using a variety of library management systems, intranet portals, and sometimes a company’s active directory. The global OpenAthens Federation is unique because it is available to customers outside the education and research sector.

AAP wanted to bring all their resources together on a single platform to maximize reach and impact via a ‘one-stop shop’. To do so successfully, says Alfred Gozun, application support specialist at AAP, meant addressing his customers’ biggest asks:

AAP asked Silverchair to help develop a solution which included an OpenAthens Federation integration. They needed a custom build that meets customers’ needs and ensures a seamless, single sign-on solution between multiple systems. AAP and Silverchair worked with OpenAthens to ensure a smooth migration from AAP’s previous platform and give users the easiest, most direct journey to the resources they want.

Solution

Silverchair and OpenAthens have collaborated in this way several times, but a few things made this project different. It was Silverchair’s first build with WAYFless and deep linking, which allows librarians to build links that bypass Silverchair’s sign-in page. This means users can get straight onto the AAP portal from their library page with all the authentication happening in the background. This was also Silverchair’s first project migrating the content from two different platforms into a single instance.

“We liaised between OpenAthens and AAP to get the account set up,” says Patrick Jordan, lead build business analyst at Silverchair. “We helped to streamline, transfer data, and migrate from AAP’s old systems. We set up the metadata and submitted it to the OpenAthens Federation, InCommon Federation in the United States, and the eduGAIN interfederation service to give the AAP platform the widest possible reach.”

Although this project introduced several firsts it launched without a hitch. OpenAthens is easy to test and the go-live and switch-over stages went smoothly.

Benefits

One of the stand-out benefits of the new implementation is an improved user experience, says Phil Leahy, key client services manager at OpenAthens:

To support this need, OpenAthens developed the Redirector, a tool that provides a scalable way to propagate links. It puts the URL of a page in a resource on the end of a consistent, customer-specific prefix. The Redirector has become the most important OpenAthens feature in the last few years. “It shaves off friction,” Phil explains. “It’s a great example of how publishers, platform partners and federation operators are working together to streamline the user’s journey.”

AAP staff now receive fewer requests for help from end users and this shows the implementation is working as planned, says Alfred Gozun. Even so, AAP has kept proxy access for users who are still using a proxy server configuration for access. And they expect to do so for some time, so that all customers are supported.

Federated access is freeing up AAP to make better use of its own internal staffing resources. The complexities of onboarding are managed by AAP’s customer services team rather than having technical conversations about peer-to-peer SAML connections and proxy stanzas. The publisher can, as Alfred Gozun says, “set it and forget it”. At the same time, he says, “for the library user it just works seamlessly, it’s like magic.”

Watch our webinar with Silverchair, streamlining access for your users.

Overview

Independent policy institute Chatham House has a mission to “help governments and societies build a sustainably secure, prosperous and just world”. It promotes understanding between nations and works to develop positive solutions to big, global challenges.

Its staff and members have wide-ranging areas of interest including defense and security, health, human rights, politics, technology and world trade, and there’s a well-stocked, carefully curated and accessible library at the heart of the organization.

Challenge

The older version of MyAthens worked well for many years, says Binni. “We very rarely had problems. If we did they were usually to do with individual resources and providers, not the portal.”

But as the library subscribed to more online resources, including EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS), these appeared in MyAthens in a rapidly lengthening list. Binni suspected that some content was under-used not because it lacked relevance, but because it was hidden in the depths.

Solution

MyAthens now offers more ways to add, edit and sort cards and include descriptions that help users select resources they want. It also lets you add curated lists of recommended books, videos or articles alongside. The library team took advantage of this to group resources by theme and type to provide a better overview of what’s available.

They’ve also customized the screens with Chatham House’s name, logo and contact details and set up WAYFless links so users have to make even fewer clicks to get to relevant resources. Binni says they’ve added even more resources as a result of the improved navigation – and estimates that set-up took no more than an afternoon.

The new MyAthens integrates with a library’s content discovery tool; in Chatham House’s case, the tool is EDS, branded internally as eLibrary. It is also fully optimized for mobile. This is enabling new ways of working, giving all library users seamless, easy access to resources. This supports the organization’s growing membership, who join Chatham House to take part in events and network with thought leaders but who often can’t easily visit in person.  It also frees Chatham House staff to work in new ways. This is timely because more staff want to work remotely, at least part of the time. Physical visits to the library premises are fewer post-pandemic, even though library use is growing.

Benefits

Library users are enjoying the same seamless access to resources that they always have. But the real benefits of MyAthens will be a faster, smoother journey to unlocking all the resources that are available to them because it is easier to see and evaluate the full catalog.

They will also be able to access the world’s largest collection of open access research papers now that OpenAthens integrates with CORE, a discoverability tool that gives access to millions of scholarly resources. Binni says:

There are also useful benefits for the organization’s busy IT department. As fully managed services, using OpenAthens and MyAthens mean they have fewer things on their to-do list.

For the Chatham House library, the reporting metrics support smart decision-making and help to demonstrate the value of its services. The team review resource usage monthly, analyzing data from several sources including the discovery system. Importantly, they also review OpenAthens data, as it is one of the most popular ways for people to access resources. They explore which resources are being used, and by which particular groups of library users: