[Eril-l] OpenAthens: Pros? Cons?

Tue May 8 09:14:03 PDT 2018

Very helpful summary, Melissa!

One additional consideration in favor of Open Athens:  Firewalls.

EZProxy is sometimes blocked by corporate and military firewalls, but
OpenAthens sounds like it will resolve that issue (since it doesn’t
re-write URLs).  We serve working adults, many of whom are deployed in the
military, and sometimes they do hit firewall issues if they’re on a
corporate or military network.

Regards,

John F. Coogan

Systems Librarian, UMUC Library

University of Maryland University College

E-mail:  john.coogan at umuc.edu

Phone: (240) 684-2022

www.umuc.edu/library

*From:* Eril-l <eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org> *On Behalf Of *Melissa
Belvadi
*Sent:* Tuesday, May 08, 2018 11:29 AM
*To:* Hwang, Amy L <Amy.Hwang at enc.edu>
*Cc:* eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
*Subject:* Re: [Eril-l] OpenAthens: Pros? Cons?

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/

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?):

o   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.

o   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

o   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:

o   care and maintenance including security responsibility for the
hardware, OS platform

o   maintenance/upgrades of the service itself (the ezproxy software)

o   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

o   maintaining our local copy of the "blacklist" is extra work

o   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;

o   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

o   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:

o   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

o   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)

o   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

o   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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