[Eril-l] OpenAthens vs campus federated SSO?

Wed May 22 07:13:17 PDT 2024

Hi Melissa,

I had the same question when my library was considering the jump to federated access.   From my perspective and if I'm understanding correctly, three major issues come to mind:  

Even though you'd be authenticating via your institution's Shib to Canarie you'd still need to configure and maintain a local IdP instance for authorization to every SP (vendor or publisher) with whom you want to establish a trusted connection.  OpenAthens maintains almost 500 of these IdP configurations in its resource catalogue so all you have to do is allocate a resource and the connection is established since OpenAthens serves as our IdP.  If one isn't available we simply contact EBSCO support who creates one for us.

A surprising number of publishers still don't support federated access, so for those that still use IP authentication you'd need to continue using EZproxy which means you'd have to maintain, support, and pay for dual authentication systems.  OpenAthens is a turnkey solution since IP-based and federated access are both supported in OpenAthens.

This may be deemed a lesser issue, but typically Shib is maintained by your campus' IT shop, so if you're piggybacking on this you'd have to use whatever branding they have in place.  You wouldn't be able to maintain consistent library branding and imagery across your access points, which is important to our patron's user experience.  

I hope this helps clarify.  Please feel free to contact me off-list if you'd like more detail.  Best of luck!

Regards,
John

__________________________________
John Felts
Head of Information Technology and Collections
University Libraries / Coastal Carolina University
376 University Boulevard
Conway SC 29526
843-349-5040

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Message: 4
Date: Tue, 21 May 2024 17:22:08 +0000
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Subject: [Eril-l] OpenAthens vs campus federated SSO?
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Hi, all.
We use ezproxy generally (self-hosted) but as our campus implemented first Shibboleth and is now moving this summer to Azure, and associated with the big Canadian SAML federation Canarie, we've been finding more and more major library content providers supporting that kind of off-campus "login via your institution", some of which didn't even contact us to configure it, but just got up and running for us from the Canarie service.

In light of that trend, I'm wondering what advantages there still are to using Open Athens (which I've been wanting to get for years but didn't have the budget or systems support for).

If any of you have Open Athens and your campus also provides SSO through that kind of SAML service, can you please tell me what OA is doing for you that makes it still worth the cost?

Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca<mailto:mbelvadi at upei.ca>  902-566-0581 ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4433-0189 my public calendar<https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/0fbab27c909e4493be65313bd66d66b6@upei.ca/5fa60af92c6d451c9ddf90c0bb11e00f15552192987609852692/calendar.html>
Make an appointment<https://mbelvadi.youcanbook.me/> via YouCanBookMe My pronouns are ????/???????
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