[Eril-l] OpenAthens: Pros? Cons?

Tue May 8 08:28:37 PDT 2018

I am very interested in others' replies to this, as I really want to switch
and am working to make the case for OA despite the extra cost - we don't
have it yet.

I am going to share with all of you here my own analysis here at UPEI, but
feel free to pick it apart and tell me if I've misunderstood anything.
Check at UPEI is a reference to links to our openurl resolver, Moodle is our
course management system, and there are a few other references to special
UPEI-specific services.
We are a self-hosted ezproxy site, on the current version.

*https://openathens.org/for-information-managers/
<https://openathens.org/for-information-managers/>Cost: [negotiated
individually, I can't share our quote, sorry]Benefits of Open Athens over
our current self-hosted ezproxy - User Experience off-campus (which is the
whole point of ezproxy, right?):- Users of major non-library-licensed
search systems like PubMed and Google Scholar will not need to take lots of
extra steps to be "within" our licenses. They just need to login to OA once
per session, then any way they find themselves at any publisher site
they'll be pre-authenticated - no "check at UPEI" special settings, "otool"
special links, etc.- Major publisher sites will invite them to authenticate
with OA if they get there directly without coming through our OA login link
even the first time within their work session, and that will stick for the
remaining OA sites. Andrew has confirmed that most of the vendors on the oa
federation list <https://www.openathens.net/resources.php?oaf> will do
this, including:  Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, Sage, Oxford, Taylor&Francis,
Cambridge, JSTOR,  ACS, EBSCO, Proquest, and Ovid. The one notable
exception that does not is Gale (but their content is not easily
discoverable in Google/ Scholar or elsewhere anyway); note that if they
have a token already from one of them, they won't need to reauthenticate
with the others during that session- OA will work even when our entire
campus network is done (and the proxy server is unreachable) for those
sites with direct OA login; we can have pre-configured emergency
username/password "local" accounts that we can give out during total
network outages if OA can't even reach our ldap/shibb system; I have done
this just for EBSCO a few times, when needed but this would work for ALL of
our licensed IP-authenticated resources, not just EBSCO- Ezproxy: Faculty
who try to make their own links to our resources in Moodle or elsewhere and
students discover right at their deadline that they don't work because they
lack the prefix- Ezproxy: Library staff have to work harder every time they
make one-off links when helping patrons - Ezproxy: Staff maintenance of
individual site "stanzas" - Hosted solution superior to internal server for
the following reasons:- care and maintenance including security
responsibility for the hardware, OS platform- maintenance/upgrades of the
service itself (the ezproxy software)- connections to the various
vendors/publishers always up to date, we don't need to figure them out and
keep changing them as the vendors change their websites- maintaining our
local copy of the "blacklist" is extra work- removes risk of error in
configuration blocks - ezproxy requires manually editing a plain text
config file in which a simple typo could cause interruption of service - OA
web-based config interface makes adding/removing service providers a matter
of gui selection;- greatly simplifies management of local accounts (eg IB
students, alumni premiere accounts, emergency accounts) - provides simple
web-based gui with granular permissions, so this could be entirely handled
by a technician, for instance, not using up Peter's time to
maintain/update- Less traffic and likely slightly better performance during
normal network conditions as users won't have all of their authenticated
traffic bouncing through our campus network/proxy server but will go
directly from publisher/vendor site to their own device - note a tradeoff
of reliability of our campus network+proxy server in exchange for the
reliability of the OA server [question about what OA does if it can't reach
our ldap/shib/AD server] - OpenAthens features that Ezproxy can't offer:-
Security/Compromised account issues:- Sophisticated algorithms for
detecting illegal/abusive use suggesting compromised accounts - very likely
to do a much better job than we do of catching problems before our
publishers notice anything- Immediate shutdown of individual compromised
accounts prevents publisher from having to shut down the entire UPEI
institutional account until the single patron's account problem is
resolved- will provide analysis for us of which patron account, what the
geographic or other suspicious conditions were, saving us time of having to
trace the activity through the multiple logs within ezproxy to piece the
"story" together- User Experience with vendor platforms:- all of our major
platforms will allow immediate access to the personalization features (aka
"My Research/My Ebscohost") without having to create separate accounts on
each platform. Note that this includes RefWorks (checking on implication
for WnC)- User Experience for our "special" accounts:- no special URLs,
will be able to use exactly the same links as everyone else- easier
maintenance of the accounts themselves will mean faster service for these
patrons- Usage Reporting - far more detailed than we can get now, depending
on how we configure things with ITSS, we could finally get info about which
departments' users are using which resources, which would give us leverage
for negotiating more favorable pricing for some subject-specialty databases
(we did that with one product but getting the data from ezproxy was a
nightmare) as well as providing important data for subject librarians to
better focus instruction/dept outreach.  We might well be able to afford
more specialty products if we had the ability to restrict specific products
to specific user groups and promise the publisher that control during price
negotiation.*

Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca 902-566-0581
my public calendar
<http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=mbelvadi%40upei.ca&ctz=America/Halifax&mode=week>

On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 12:14 PM, Hwang, Amy L <Amy.Hwang at enc.edu> wrote:

> Hello All,
>
>
>
> I’m considering switching to OpenAthens for authentication rather than
> staying with EZproxy. Has anyone made that switch? I have a couple of
> reasons for thinking about switching. The version of EZproxy that my IT
> department currently hosts is no longer supported, and they don’t want to
> host an updated version of EZproxy. (I would be switching to hosted EZproxy
> instead.) It seems to me that although OpenAthens is more expensive, I
> wouldn’t have to involve IT as much, and I could get out-of-the-box
> statistics that lets me know who is logging in and to what resources. (It
> would make it easier to know what to cut if needed.)
>
>
>
> Most of the resources my library subscribes to are “big deal” collections
> rather than titles accessed from publisher websites. I’ve looked on some
> listservs and seen that some libraries use *both* EZproxy and OpenAthens,
> but I can’t afford to do that.
>
>
>
> Any advice you have for me would be greatly appreciated!
>
>
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Amy Hwang
>
>
>
> * Please excuse the cross-posting.*
>
>
>
> Amy L. Hwang, MLS | Director of Library Services | Nease Library, Eastern
> Nazarene College | 23 E. Elm Ave., Quincy, MA 02170 | 617-745-3854
>
>
>
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>
>
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