Category Archives: oa.authentication

Common Scholarly Communication Infrastructure Landscape Review – Ithaka S+R

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“Scholarly communication is a complicated sector, with numerous participants and multiple mechanisms for communicating and reviewing materials created in an increasing variety of formats by researchers across the globe.[1] In turn, the researcher who seeks to use the products of this system wishes to discover, access, and use relevant and trustworthy materials as effortlessly as possible. The work of driving efficiency into this complex sector while bringing its multiple strands together seamlessly for the reader (or, increasingly, for a computational user) rests on a foundation of infrastructure, much of it shared across multiple publishers. In this landscape review, we seek to provide a high-level overview of the shared infrastructure that supports scholarly communication. The purpose of this landscape review is to provide scoping for the array of shared infrastructure that we intend to examine in a larger project about the strategic context that has driven and will continue to drive the development of this infrastructure. That project will include a needs analysis on what parts of the shared scholarly communication infrastructure are working well and where they can be improved, culminating in recommendations for where additional or revised collective action and community investment is indicated….”

Equitable Open-Source for web3

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“The tools that build the internet have steeped too long. For the past two decades, big tech has made trillions off the generosity of visionary developers and web pioneers… never thanking, never mentioning, and certainly never paying. At tea, we’re brewing something to change that by enabling developers (you) to continue doing what you love, while earning what you deserve….

We’re calling on all open?source devs to authenticate their Github with tea.

 

Developers who have contributed to OSS will be entitled to a variety of rewards, including minted NFT badges to honor your work so far. This is your chance to be an early member of our community: take a sip while it’s hot!…”

FIM4L Working Group in Talks with Elsevier — Towards Federated Access Best Practices – LIBER Europe

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“At the beginning of 2022, the LIBER FIM4L Working Group and Elsevier held a series of talks on the topic of federated access. 

Federated access, also called Shibboleth or SSO, can be used by libraries to provide access to electronic resources. During the login process information about the user is (often) exchanged with the publisher. The library, publisher, and user can decide which information to share…

Points of consideration for anonymous login:

Not all Elsevier products support anonymity.
If an anonymous, logged-in user decides to set up alerts at e.g. Sciencedirect, they will be informed that they should log in first. Then they probably create a new user account, perhaps apart from an existing one, and their current session gets terminated.
When an identified user logs out, they cannot log in anonymously anymore in that session.

 

If anonymous login would be officially supported by a publisher, then it is important to inform a user using very clear communication. This is difficult for two reasons: Users do not understand these login differences and there could always be cases during the user’s journey where they might not at all be informed….”

New OSF enhancements for community-developed, open source infrastructure

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“Not only do researchers use OSF as a tool to accelerate science by collaborating, managing and sharing their research; they’re also stakeholders in its sustainable development through the ability to access, review, interact with, and contribute to OSF’s open source code. 

By its nature, open source infrastructure is community oriented. The transparent OSF code invites the community of researchers and science stakeholders working to increase rigor and reproducibility to contribute code and ideas to enhance functionality, and benefit from the enhanced security and reliability by their involvement and review throughout the development process. These communities of researchers trust the OSF, and support it by maintaining its alignment to their needs by providing feedback and extending its use through third-party integrations. This continuum is propelled as OSF’s community of developers, users, and partners work together toward a shared vision: to accelerate scientific progress.

Together, an inclusive and open technology enables communities to embrace transparent and rigorous research practices with assurance that the infrastructure embodies the same principles of openness, transparency, and inclusion. As such, we prioritize the transparent development of an OSF experience that facilitates sustainability and mitigates technical barriers to the adoption of open and rigorous practices. 

A recent example of these priorities in action is the new Central Authentication Service (CAS) update for OSF, a state-of-the-art authentication framework that enhances the OSF login interface and brings a smoother, faster integration experience with external identity providers like ORCID and research institutions….”

New OSF enhancements for community-developed, open source infrastructure

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“Not only do researchers use OSF as a tool to accelerate science by collaborating, managing and sharing their research; they’re also stakeholders in its sustainable development through the ability to access, review, interact with, and contribute to OSF’s open source code. 

By its nature, open source infrastructure is community oriented. The transparent OSF code invites the community of researchers and science stakeholders working to increase rigor and reproducibility to contribute code and ideas to enhance functionality, and benefit from the enhanced security and reliability by their involvement and review throughout the development process. These communities of researchers trust the OSF, and support it by maintaining its alignment to their needs by providing feedback and extending its use through third-party integrations. This continuum is propelled as OSF’s community of developers, users, and partners work together toward a shared vision: to accelerate scientific progress.

Together, an inclusive and open technology enables communities to embrace transparent and rigorous research practices with assurance that the infrastructure embodies the same principles of openness, transparency, and inclusion. As such, we prioritize the transparent development of an OSF experience that facilitates sustainability and mitigates technical barriers to the adoption of open and rigorous practices. 

A recent example of these priorities in action is the new Central Authentication Service (CAS) update for OSF, a state-of-the-art authentication framework that enhances the OSF login interface and brings a smoother, faster integration experience with external identity providers like ORCID and research institutions….”

Navigating the barbed wire of publisher access barriers | Plan S

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“In many ways, the specific details of this situation are irrelevant. What does matter is the important points it raises:

From the baffling experiences described above, one concludes that not only is the assortment of access options confusing for readers but that major publishers are challenged to engineer and control access and authentication as they intended. Such examples validate the reasons why hybrid OA journals are problematic.

There is a significant effort associated with gatekeeping and preventing potential readers from accessing content, when research should be disseminated and read as widely as possible. This represents an increased cost in the production of publications – a cost which is ultimately borne by the subscriber or individual reader. 

There is considerable evidence that open access articles are more read than non Open access articles. Indeed, even SpringerNature, the publisher of the article example above, states that “Open approaches accelerate the progress of science…. OA is immediately accessible and highly discoverable… Previous research shows the OA advantage for researchers: OA articles are cited on average 1.6 times more than non-OA articles, downloaded 4 times more often and attract 2.5 times more attention, as measured by news and policy mentions”.

Wouldn’t it be better if the money, time and energy invested by publishers in attempting to build a complex variety of access barriers were directed towards providing a consistent approach to access? Then the money, time and energy spent by researchers and libraries in paying for and attempting to access content, via confused and confusing interfaces, could be better spent on research. If authentication and access control are so challenging, and we all, including publishers, agree that Open Access is beneficial, then we need to abandon these types of attempts at gatekeeping, and instead focus on making all research publications easily openly accessible.”

Guest Post – Lessons Learned: A Year with GetFTR – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“Utilizing real time entitlement checks, GetFTR streamlines access to published journal content from discovery tools and scholarly collaboration networks, both for subscription and open access content. Dead ends are minimized for researchers as they can easily determine which content their institution has made available to them, both on or off-campus via the visual GetFTR link. (Think visually like the Amazon Prime trust mark). While we don’t pretend to put GetFTR forward as the sole solution, it is a more streamlined and sustainable way to support all in facilitating easier access to research, globally, from any location.

Responses have been predominantly positive, and to date, ten publishers and a further 11 integrators have already signed on. From a user perspective, we have seen month-on-month growth of positive links returned and have received very useful feedback. However, we have not been immune to criticism or misunderstanding of the service, particularly  how GetFTR impacts the role of librarians and link resolvers, privacy, and the need to provide more flexibility and support for integrators of the service….”

How the Pandemic has Changed Authentication and Access

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“Librarians and information professionals with responsibility for providing access to digital scholarly resources need to understand all the authentication options available to them and their end-users. This free webinar will feature Springer Nature Senior Digital Product Manager Laird Barrett discussing all available approaches to authentication. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, it was overwhelmingly common for researchers to authenticate via IP address to access institutional subscriptions on Springer Nature websites. That behavior changed dramatically with the onset of the pandemic, as researchers in many countries quickly transitioned to working from home. Researchers now use a constellation of different methods in greater numbers to authenticate, including persisted access, Google Scholar CASA, and federated access. This free webinar will explore that change over time and across the world, and will share information about Springer Nature’s plans this year to continue to ease authentication and access for researchers during the pandemic. Expect details that will help you across many scholarly resource platforms, as well as measures that are specific to Springer Nature. This webinar is part of an ongoing effort to provide technical education programming for information professionals. …”

Improving access and delivery of academic content – a survey of current & emerging trends | Musings about librarianship

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“Some readers might be thinking that this might be a odd time for us to start focusing on improving user experiences with delivery given that the coming of open access might make a lot of this moot.

 

There are two answers to this. Firstly open access even in the most optimistic of projections will still have a decade or more to go and is likely to cover only journal articles. Libraries will still need to provide access to other licensed resources (A&I indexes, image archives etc) that will not be covered by Open Access.

 

The other reason is that some content providers even in a open access world would still want users to authenticate, so they can track usage and users.”

Improving access and delivery of academic content – a survey of current & emerging trends | Musings about librarianship

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“Some readers might be thinking that this might be a odd time for us to start focusing on improving user experiences with delivery given that the coming of open access might make a lot of this moot.

 

There are two answers to this. Firstly open access even in the most optimistic of projections will still have a decade or more to go and is likely to cover only journal articles. Libraries will still need to provide access to other licensed resources (A&I indexes, image archives etc) that will not be covered by Open Access.

 

The other reason is that some content providers even in a open access world would still want users to authenticate, so they can track usage and users.”

Campus Activated Subscriber Access (CASA) – Highwire Press

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“HighWire and Google co-developed CASA (Campus Activated Subscriber Access) as an authentication enhancement that improves the authentication for off-campus users of Google Scholar.  CASA is free and is automatically enabled for all HighWire-hosted Journals that are indexed in Google Scholar.

How does it work?

When a user is on-campus, they often connect to a University network. When connected, if they visit Google Scholar, Google automatically creates an affiliation between that user and their institution.  This affiliation allows Google Scholar to record that the user has subscription privileges granted by that institution. With Google CASA, this same seamless authentication follows the user when they take their device to any off-campus location.   Once the affiliation is created, it grants them immediate access to the articles and Journals that their institution subscribes to even when the user is off campus….”

Campus Activated Subscriber Access (CASA) – Highwire Press

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“HighWire and Google co-developed CASA (Campus Activated Subscriber Access) as an authentication enhancement that improves the authentication for off-campus users of Google Scholar.  CASA is free and is automatically enabled for all HighWire-hosted Journals that are indexed in Google Scholar.

How does it work?

When a user is on-campus, they often connect to a University network. When connected, if they visit Google Scholar, Google automatically creates an affiliation between that user and their institution.  This affiliation allows Google Scholar to record that the user has subscription privileges granted by that institution. With Google CASA, this same seamless authentication follows the user when they take their device to any off-campus location.   Once the affiliation is created, it grants them immediate access to the articles and Journals that their institution subscribes to even when the user is off campus….”

Why are Librarians Concerned about GetFTR?  – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“Twitter was abuzz this past week with the announcement of Get Full Text Research (GetFTR) at the STM association meeting in London. GetFTR attempts to reduce friction between discovery and access through a new kind of linking data service, and Roger Schonfeld’s same day analysis here in The Scholarly Kitchen provided some information from a publisher perspective. 

Developed by a group of five of the largest publishers, and built on top of RA21’s Seamless Access service, GetFTR was very effectively kept under wraps until the formal announcement — so much so that the staff of NISO, a lead partner in Seamless Access, was completely unaware of the project. 

GetFTR offers clear benefits for publishers and researchers. A direct link to a copy with known access entitlements is very useful. But, it seems some were taken aback by the less than warm welcome the announcement received from the library community.

Today, I wish to articulate why many librarians are concerned about GetFTR. …

GetFTR builds on the foundation of Seamless Access, an initiative that troubles the library community. The predecessor project, RA21, raised many concerns related to control over and privacy of user data and the future of publisher support for proxy and IP based authentication, access pathways that are valued and broadly implemented in academic libraries. The follow-on organization to the RA21 project, Seamless Access, seems to be unable to find a library organization partner to join the leadership team in spite of making a number of overtures, and the group has chosen to move forward with implementation without that engagement. By connecting itself to Seamless Access, GetFTR is “inheriting” a number of the library critiques of Seamless Access….”

 

Welcome to SeamlessAccess.org | SA Site

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“Seamless Access is the new, convenient way to access digital scholarly content and services that builds on the guidelines resulting from the Resource Access in the 21st Century (RA21) initiative. It sets a standard for digital authentication based on a single sign on through your own home institution.

The Coalition for Seamless Access is a non-profit initiative geared towards supporting research and scholarship.
Now you can seamlessly find and use content and services outside your institution network anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Research as it should be!…

No cost to use Seamless Access? Flexible implementation that works with your existing site design? Straight-forward implementation? What are you waiting for?! See the Getting Started guide to understand the high-level steps, and contact Laura at laura@SeamlessAccess.org for a Getting Started Consultation to help plan your path to Seamless Access….”

New service from publishers to streamline access to research

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“Get Full Text Research (GetFTR) is a new, free to use solution that enables faster access for researchers to the published journal articles they need.

When researchers are using online tools to search for research, GetFTR will provide seamless pathways to the published journal articles they want. Researchers will be able to link directly to the most up to date and best version of an article. To create a seamless experience, researchers will be taken directly to the article, and just the article, from a wide variety of discovery tools that they are already using. Even if a researcher does not have the relevant institutional access to an article, publishers can provide an alternative version of the content. Importantly, GetFTR enables users to access content in this way both off-campus and on-campus.

Publishers and providers of online research services are encouraged and invited to take part in GetFTR’s development to help maximize its benefits for the research community….

When using today’s discovery tools and platforms, researchers will be able to easily tell which content their institution has made available to them via the GetFTR indicator. They will then be able to follow the enhanced links provided by GetFTR to seamlessly access research on publisher websites.

For users who do not have access based upon their institutional affiliation, participating publishers can provide access to an alternative version of the research, which will be more extensive than the abstract, enabling the user to better understand the nature of the article e.g. a preprint….”