[Eril-l] Taylor & Francis ebooks and EZproxy

[Fox, Linda J.]

Greetings,

I wanted to follow up on a question I posed to this list in January.  Thanks to everyone who responded to my original post.

We now are able to link to the Taylor & Francis ebook platform through EZproxy, and I wanted to share the solution here in case anyone else is seeing the same issue.  The person who manages EZproxy for us provided the following information about the solution: "My solution was to only proxy taylorfrancis.com and taylorandfrancis.com and set a NeverProxy their api, secure, and events hosts as they wer the host presenting Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) errors."

Regards,

Linda Fox
Senior Library Information Specialist
(816) 235-5290
foxlj at umkc.edu<mailto:foxlj at umkc.edu>

University of Missouri - Kansas City
Electronic Resources & Acquisitions
UMKC Libraries
800 E 51st Street
Kansas City, MO  64110
https://library.umkc.edu<https://library.umkc.edu/>



From: Fox, Linda J.
Sent: Friday, January 29, 2021 9:18 AM
To: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
Subject: Taylor & Francis ebooks and EZproxy

Greetings,

I'm hoping that someone on this list has successfully dealt with the issue we are facing and can offer a suggestion for solving with it.

We are having a problem with accessing our Taylor & Francis ebooks (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/).  We use EZproxy for remote access, and users are receiving the following message: "You do not have access to this content currently."  On-campus users can access content when EZproxy is not used.  Access to the journal platform (https://www.tandfonline.com) is not affected.

We first noticed this issue in November, but we don't have many books on the Taylor & Francis platform, so the issue could be older.  Over the two and a half months that we have been struggling with this, the message text has changed.  At first, we saw "We've had an error looking up if you have access to this title. Please refresh to try again."  (Refreshing didn't help.)  Then it was "Your institution has not purchased this content. Please get in touch with your librarian to recommend this."  And today it has changed again: "You do not have access to this content currently."

We have reached out to Taylor & Francis, and were told that the only thing necessary for EZproxy access is to use the current recommendation in our configuration file.  We doublechecked, and we do.  They did suggest that we try moving the stanza to the beginning of the file, but that did not fix the problem.  If that didn't work, they suggested, we should talk to OCLC.

The person who manages our EZproxy server has offered the following analysis:

"This is an issue with how Taylor & Francis uses Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) and that they use a third-party host for authorized use of the ebook.  I can disable CORS for the Taylor & Francis host but not their authorization host.  When testing browsers buy disabling CORS for the browser, this causes a security notification for the browser, the authorization for use validation fails....The problem most often happens when using CSS containing JavaScript in an iframe."

We have a faculty member who intends to assign a reading from a book on this platform in March.  We do have a campus VPN that students could use, but that solution is klunky, so we would much rather get this fixed before that.  Any ideas that we could try would be appreciated.

Sincerely,

Linda Fox
Senior Library Information Specialist
(816) 235-5290
foxlj at umkc.edu<mailto:foxlj at umkc.edu>

University of Missouri - Kansas City
Miller Nichols Library
Electronic Resources & Acquisitions
800 E 51st Street
Kansas City, MO  64110
https://library.umkc.edu



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