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Streamlining Access for Your Users: A case study from OpenAthens, Silverchair, and the American Academy of Pediatrics
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Streamlining Access for Your Users: A case study from OpenAthens, Silverchair, and the American Academy of Pediatrics
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
JANE CHARLTON: Hello, everyone. And welcome to today's webinar, Streamlining Access to Your Users. This is a joint webinar with OpenAthens, Silverchair, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. I'm Jane Charlton, international marketing manager at OpenAthens. And I'll be facilitating today's webinar. So during the webinar, we'll be discussing the challenges, the solutions, and the benefits around how content platform migrations affect your access models.
JANE CHARLTON: OpenAthens and Silverchair have collaborated on a number of software integrations recently. And you'll hear from the American Academy of Pediatrics who will tell us a little bit about their experiences and the business benefits of working with us on the launch of their unified publication portal. But before we get started, I just want to run through some housekeeping stuff with you guys.
JANE CHARLTON: So first of all, we are recording the webinar. And anyone who's registered will receive the recording link after the webinar. If you have a question for our panel of speakers, please post these in the Q&A box. If you have any more general queries, maybe technical issues, for example, if you can please post those separately in the chat. We also have live captioning on.
JANE CHARLTON: So for people who are hard of hearing or deaf, you can enable the live transcript as we run through the webinar. So just want to give you a quick introduction to today's speakers. We have Alfred Gozun, who is application support specialist at AAP, Hannah Heckner, director of product strategy at Silverchair, Patrick Gordon-- Jordan, sorry, lead build business analyst also from Silverchair, and Phil Leahy, key client Services Manager from OpenAthens.
JANE CHARLTON: And just to quickly run through the running order for today's webinar. So Phil will kick off with an introduction to federated single sign-on and OpenAthens for publishers. Alfred will then follow with how OpenAthens supports AAP's business models and business needs. And then we'll hear from Patrick and Hannah, who will discuss software integration and how OpenAthens supports direct links to content.
JANE CHARLTON: And then we'll have a general discussion around user experiences, how we've overcome any challenges during the project and next steps. And then finally, at the end there'll be an opportunity for you to ask your questions to our speaker panel. So without further ado, I'll now hand over to Phil Leahy.
PHIL LEAHY: Hi, everybody. Mute your speak speaker. OK, I think we've managed to sort that out. So good afternoon, good morning wherever you are. It's nice to be here to talk to you about OpenAthens and Silverchair and how publishers all work together. So first thing to say is that OpenAthens, we've been providing services to the academic community for over two decades.
PHIL LEAHY: Our core mission remains unchanged, and that is to remove barriers to content. And so although we're kind of ancient in technology terms or at least our origins, we do remain the leaders in what is admittedly a very niche space. OpenAthens continues to exist because access management is complex. And it's not simply a case of "implementing the technology," quote unquote.
PHIL LEAHY: There's much more to it than that. And here's an approximate timeline of all the elements that are in the mix right now. So IP recognition, which obviously has been a thing since 1974, is the origin of that technology. And then right through that timeline, so what was then called Athens was released in 1996 originally. Hence, the recent birthday.
PHIL LEAHY: EZProxy shortly after that, and then SAML in 2002. And this is a good depiction of the journey that publishers and libraries have been through over this period and also, where the challenges that we face arise from. Much of this access management and subscription world is heavily reliant on proxy services and IP address recognition as well as VPNs in some cases as well. And these will probably be in place for a little while yet.
PHIL LEAHY: But let's not kid ourselves, these are aging technologies, some of them. And they were never designed for authentication in the first place. So it's interesting to see that although SAML is now 20 years old, it's still the standard today. But its age goes some way to explaining why it is complex in the eyes of many implementers. So getting down to how OpenAthens operates in the access management world, this is a cross-section of our customer base.
PHIL LEAHY: So although this stuff really did start in the education sector, in academic and research sectors, OpenAthens has really made SAML and SAML-based access management technologies available to a much wider set of markets to the point where the academic and research market actually now represents less than half of our institutional customer base. The reason for that, for the other half essentially is that most of those or the rest of your customer base, they're not eligible to join their national access management federation.
PHIL LEAHY: And so a massive gap opened up in the market when federations were first released. And we realized that we could help publishers maximize the investment that they were making in some of these technologies and make it available to other customer types, not just the academic and research sector. So here are some of those elements that we were talking about before.
PHIL LEAHY: Proxy solutions, as I said, it's been-- I think when I first started with the service back in the year 2000, well, I was told the IP recognition was probably on its way out. So that clearly hasn't been the case. But as time has gone on, they have become increasingly fragile that the stanzas have always required regular attention and, I think, arguably more so as publisher products get more complex.
PHIL LEAHY: And they're just no longer suitable as an access management solution anymore. Alternative SAML applications are in place, typically, peer-to-peer connections, but they're inefficient. They're typically built one per customer, a direct connection, as the name implies, between customer and publisher. But they're difficult to set up and maintain.
PHIL LEAHY: They need at least second level technical expertise on the publisher side. And on the library side, they might not access-- be able to call on that kind of technical expertise to open up the pipe if you like it therein. And it's therefore expensive for everybody. And for publishers, it's eating into their margin. There's no way that it should be that difficult to set up access by SAML.
PHIL LEAHY: So publishers are increasingly choosing federated access because it's one implementation with multiple uses, ie, many thousands of customers can connect to a single federated implementation. It's part of a trusted network of entities. And what that means is that with SAML metadata underpinning everything, there's a trust fabric right there. So you don't need to-- your customers don't need to revalidate you as a vendor every single time they want to onboard your products or take out a new subscription.
PHIL LEAHY: And onboarding on the publisher side, it's managed by customer service teams, not second line support. So it's a much more efficient use of a publisher's resources. No metadata exchange required on a peer-to-peer basis. And this improves security as well. So if there's a single user is hammering your product with what possibly scripted logins, for example, with IP recognition, you have to block the entire organization in order to address that.
PHIL LEAHY: With SAML, you get a unique identifier for the user to-- and you can block them rather than everybody else at that same organization. [COUGHS] excuse me. And as a result of widening the participation in the access management ecosystem, if you like, we see a massive rise in traffic. So just over six years ago, we were-- so we were seeing just under 2 million transfers per month in 2016.
PHIL LEAHY: And fast-forward to February 2022, and it's now over 16 million transfers per month. So there's been multiple orders of magnitude in terms of growth. And then just to finish up, the next application of SAML ecosystem is Seamless Access. So publishers have been implementing SAML federated access management in a roughly coherent and sort of-- but not necessarily coordinated way.
PHIL LEAHY: Different development teams have been doing things slightly differently and then ultimately presenting the user journey in different ways. Seamless Access is intended to put together a much more coherent user journey so that users see consistent visual cues regardless of the product that they are accessing. And OpenAthens has been on the committees for Seamless Access since its inception.
PHIL LEAHY: And from there, I'm going to hand over to Alfred, I believe.
ALFRED GOZUN: Thank you, Phil, for the overview and an explanation for the OpenAthens. So I actually will be going ahead. And just as a brief introduction to myself, my name is Alfred Gozun. I'm an application support specialist with the American Academy of Pediatrics. So in my role, I'm speaking and assisting our customers directly as far as their needs. And when it comes to the actual OpenAthens implementation, as Phil alluded to, a lot of them is dealing with librarians in different industries.
ALFRED GOZUN: So I can further expand on that. I can go ahead and start sharing my screen. So just give me one moment. Is everyone able to see my slides?
PHIL LEAHY: Yes, we can.
ALFRED GOZUN: OK, thank you. So I apologize. I've been looking off a little bit-- the other screen is on the side here. OK, so again, as I alluded to, the sectors that I've noticed a lot that Phil also alluded to was the education sector, which is the universities and the health care networks. I did also note that Phil mentioned some government sectors as well, which we've also had experience with assisting the health departments libraries.
ALFRED GOZUN: But as far as the university and health care networks, is the main bulk of what we deal with. And we are assisting, as far as university access, maybe students who are trying to access certain contents through the university's library catalogs. We offer resources that the university is able to provide through their library catalog. So OpenAthens is one way that they allow that access when they're searching through the library's catalog to be taken directly to that resource and get authenticated.
ALFRED GOZUN: And OpenAthens is one of the factors that helps streamline that process for the libraries and their patrons. So moving on to the next. How is the standardization of OpenAthens authentication process allowed for flexibility to support various configurations for the librarians? So with the librarians, they have different options to configure their catalog.
ALFRED GOZUN: So the nice thing with OpenAthens is that most of the major providers for laying out the catalog is supported with this OpenAthens authentication. So I've given some examples of some of those systems that are being used. ExLibris is one that Texas Medical Center libraries, one of the customers that we've assisted that uses ExLibris. Ovid is another one that is utilized with OpenAthens.
ALFRED GOZUN: And Indiana University Health Medical Library is the example that I remember working as far as with that. And Wolters Kluwer is another one. I couldn't think of a direct example but that's another one that I'm familiar with as well. And I also included the company intranet sites. I don't know, this hasn't come up too often, but I just wanted to make a point of that. There was an organization that I was assisting and troubleshooting that I was able to test.
ALFRED GOZUN: And it looked like they had their log in portal coming through a Microsoft login Active Directory. So just to show that it's compatible with multiple configurations for the library. And so if they're setting it up through Microsoft Active Directory or through one of the service providers for their Alma systems, OpenAthens is very flexible and allows as far as that because of their experience overall, just being able to optimize and refine everything to suit to all the different configurations.
ALFRED GOZUN: And next is how has the standardization of OpenAthens authentication process allowed for flexibility to provide support among various platforms for publishers? So similar to how the librarians have different options, publishers also have different ways that they can decide on how to present and provide access to their content. So again, OpenAthens is very diverse and as far as versatile in allowing the seamless compatibility between multiple content hose.
ALFRED GOZUN: So this actually can be seen in our own experience with the American Academy of Pediatrics as we-- prior to our current platform, we actually had our resources split up into two vendors. And we were able to provide access through OpenAthens on both platforms. So the way it was set up previously was that the AAP journals and ebooks were hosted by HighWire Press.
ALFRED GOZUN: And the way that we were able to allocate or provide access to those versus allocating the unique OpenAthens organization ID, and that determined which organization-- identified which organization was attempting authentication and was able to process through that. And then the other side of that was our AAP point of care solutions products which this was hosted by Silverchair. And that uses the Shibboleth configuration to identify the organization.
ALFRED GOZUN: So there's separate area parameters with entity ID and scope which we are able to configure on our access management system with Silverchair to help get that authentication through OpenAthens. And what are the most requested features asked by customers for providing access through OpenAthens? So I was able to pinpoint three of the main requests.
ALFRED GOZUN: The first being the ability to provide authentication through the SAML protocol, which Phil again, he touched up on with as far as advantages of having SAML protocols in place. The one thing that I've gotten from that is that for the librarians and our customers side, it's just an easier way for maintenance. They won't have to worry about maintaining too many different types of URLs.
ALFRED GOZUN: There's a standard syntax that we're able to utilize for OpenAthens. And also the credentials are pretty much isolated for just-- to be able to handle different platforms. So the single sign-on implementation for that is an advantage for SAML. And then the next is ability to authenticate and direct users to the resources with WAYFless URL. And WAYFless URL is important because typically, if you don't have a support for WAYFless URLs, if you're trying to maybe go to resources from a library catalog, and it will direct you-- before it takes you to the actual content, without WAYFless, you will have-- it will be challenged to validate where you're coming from.
ALFRED GOZUN: And you have to select-- There was a screenshot in Phil's presentation that showed where you wouldn't have to select the federation and the organization. So that cuts the session a little bit because the users will have to worry about one extra thing. So WAYFless URL support is one thing that was requested because that completely bypasses the need for users to have to select automatically based off of the configuration.
ALFRED GOZUN: It will already know where they're authenticating from and just go forward with that. And then the last one that has been requested is the ability to provide authentication and the direct to users with deep link targets. So what deep link targets is-- for an example, again, if users are searching for specific topics, they could be presented with multiple resources from different publishers.
ALFRED GOZUN: And maybe one of our journal articles comes up, a specific article that they would like to go to. The link ideally would direct them directly to that article. And that is what-- it was referred as before the article link or deep link. So without that support or that capability, if a user clicks on a link for a specific article, but it doesn't take him to the article, maybe just take them to the home page of the publisher's site, then the user will still have to take extra time on their end to navigate through the interface of the publisher's website, which they're probably not familiar with the first time they're being directed to.
ALFRED GOZUN: So having that deep link support was very important as far as being able to have that ability to have users directed straight to their resources without any extra work on the user's end. And how is the integration of OpenAthens and implantation by Silverchair on AAP Publications address the request? So going back to that the SAML authentication because it's easier maintenance for the librarians because they have to only worry about a specific syntax.
ALFRED GOZUN: So I had an example. This is basically-- they call it-- also referred to as go link because in the prefix, you can see that it has the go and then-- But the main thing is that the librarians only-- when they set up links on their catalog for different resources, they would only have to really worry about this area that's in brackets where they would just-- the scope is determined by the organization's profile in OpenAthens.
ALFRED GOZUN: And then the target URL is basically what resource-- if it's an article, this link to the specific article for that publisher. So again, they can use deep links with this federated redirector as well because it's supported with deep links. And as far as the end for the WAYFless side where it allows users to bypass selecting where they're coming from, this is something that's configured on the service provider dashboard for the publishers.
ALFRED GOZUN: And this is an example of how we have our setup. I think is more of a set it and forget it type thing. So once you have this in place, it looks like that they pretty much coordinate as far as what this director from the library page, it will work together with the publisher's service dashboard to do all the work in the background. So it will just do all the handshake and authentication without the user really having to worry about what's going on in.
ALFRED GOZUN: And they'll just get their authentication and be directed to the resource as their intended. And so how does this all translate into the optimal experience for our customers and the users? Again, by not having to worry about multiple different formats of links, having that standardized federated redirector syntax will allow the libraries to easily create links for multiple resources using that same syntax.
ALFRED GOZUN: And they just have to pretty much configure that target URL. And everything else as far as the authentication is handled through the other areas of the syntax of the URL. And as far as the users' end, again, this will allow them to just be able to search in their session, look up what they need to do. If they find something that interests them, they're just going to be able to click on the link for that article or ebook or whatever resource, and not have to worry about anything else on there.
ALFRED GOZUN: And it's automatically just going to determine where they're authenticating, if they have the access. And with the deep link capability, also, just take them straight to that specific article without having to worry about navigating anything extra. And how is the collaboration with OpenAthens and Silverchair carried over these capabilities and improved on solutions?
ALFRED GOZUN: So going back to our previous platform, when HighWire was the host for AAP journals and ebooks, we did have that full capability of having that federated URL with the WAYFless and deep links. So that was very important for us when we moved over the AAP journals and ebooks onto our current AAP Publications platform. And Silverchair was able to leverage that and apply that in its functional on our current platform.
ALFRED GOZUN: And what they also were able to do to expand on is the point of care solutions that we actually had on our whole platform. Had some limitations as far as the SAML-- the SAML was working, but it didn't support deep links. So again, that was one thing that we noticed being requested for that support because if users are going to a catalog and searching and they don't get directly to that article when they click on it, it's a little bit more confusing.
ALFRED GOZUN: And they have to do a little bit more time on their end to find the resource, instead of being directed properly. So we were able to expand on that. And now, it's capable to work on working on our point of care solutions as well on the current platform. And how's the new AAP Publications platform contributed to the evolution of supporting users through federated access?
ALFRED GOZUN: Again, so now that we have everything full support for all the products that we offer on this current platform, everything is pretty much-- from the old platform that people were requesting is now has been met. But we also did preserve that alternate authentication. I'm sorry I didn't touch on this, but on the old platform, the deep link support for SAML wasn't available, but there was that alternate option, which was through the proxy access.
ALFRED GOZUN: And Phil mentioned how proxy, there's the disadvantages that it has between that and the SAML. So obviously, that's why we were hoping to be able to provide deep links for the SAML part of it. But we did actually still preserve that proxy access in case there are users who aren't able to get their federated authentication to work or they're still using a proxy server configuration. So again, Phil did say that proxy method is still something that could be around for a while.
ALFRED GOZUN: So we've taken note of that and still allow that method to be available. And then as far as further evolution is extended the capability of configuring Shibboleth parameters to other federations. So the same type of configuration we have for allowing OpenAthens, it also will work with other federations that participate with eduGAIN. There are some in Italy, the IDEM, some in Germany and Malaysia that we've been able to add to our supported list of federations that we can provide access through.
ALFRED GOZUN: So that's something that was not actually available on the old platform. So it's one nice thing that we're able to provide now. Right now, it doesn't have the option for the WAYFless. So they would still have to go to a page where they select the federation and the organization, but it does support deep links. It's better than what we had before where didn't-- if people were asking from other federations and they didn't have, and they weren't part of OpenAthens, then there was wasn't anything that we could provide any type of solution.
ALFRED GOZUN: But now that we have that extended for other federations, that's one other thing that's been helpful for that. So that's basically how OpenAthens has helped and the American Academy of Pediatrics as far as their business needs. So I hope that information was helpful for you, anyone who's considering working with OpenAthens or even those that are already working with, maybe more familiarity with how you can maximize the features that are available to you.
ALFRED GOZUN: And with that, I'll go ahead and pass along--
JANE CHARLTON: Thank you, Alfred.
ALFRED GOZUN: Sure.
JANE CHARLTON: Thank you that was a really, really interesting and very detailed case study. So thank you for your time there. So I think if we can move on to Hannah and Patrick now from Silverchair. And if you have any questions that you'd like to ask our speakers, just a reminder to please pop those in the Q&A box. Thank you.
PATRICK JORDAN: All right, absolutely. Well, thank you everyone for joining. Again, my name is Patrick Jordan. And I'm the lead build business analyst over at Silverchair here. Just to set the scene a little bit with my role, I've been with the company for around 10 years now working specifically on migrations pretty much that entire time. So generally we're dealing with clients who are completely new to the Silverchair platform as well as existing internal clients that want to move their site over to what we call our platform from a more bespoke application.
PATRICK JORDAN: In the case of AAP, it was a pretty unique migration because we were actually doing both things at once. As Albert kind of touched on, we had an existing suite of AAP products called Solutions on sort of a custom bespoke site on our platform. And then they were bringing over their journals and books from another provider, so kind of migrating to sites at once into one single unified site as a one-stop shop. So my role specifically is mainly to work with clients to give them an overview of our platform offering, help them decide what existing features and services they want as well as integration such as OpenAthens.
PATRICK JORDAN: And then identify any gaps in their requirements from what the platform currently provides. And so whenever a gap is found, sometimes that can lead to custom development. Sometimes we're able to work with a product strategy, someone like Hannah, and get a feature built at the platform level. So it's something that all of our clients can benefit from. And so I think OpenAthens is a good example of that.
PATRICK JORDAN: And there were definitely some new features we got to build in as part of the AAP migration and utilize that, again, Alfred touched on with some of the WAYFless URLs and deep linking. As far as the build process itself, we're an agile shop. We work with Scrum teams, a handful of developers, a product owner, a tester, a business analyst like myself, and a Scrum master. And so generally, once this sort of initial phase is complete where we've identified all of the client requirements, we start actual development from that point on, help them set up their site.
PATRICK JORDAN: We work with the UI team to apply a client style guides and branding, and then start setting up all the various integrations that are needed along with that. So as far as how integrations work on the Silverchair platform, there's a wide range of services. Some of which can be turned on as simply as sort of flipping a switch, changing the configuration from false to true.
PATRICK JORDAN: And then there are a few that are a little bit more advanced. And I would put OpenAthens in that category, which is why we have such a strong relationship with them and try to keep really OpenAthens lanes of communication. Whenever a new build is in the works on our side, we try to give them a heads up early so that we can work together to get that integration in place. There's a fair amount that's involved with the OpenAthens' integration specifically.
PATRICK JORDAN: Silverchair treats them as a Shibboleth federation. So there's Shibboleth metadata that has to be set up, submitted to any comment on our side, which is the United States Federation and a partner of eduGAIN, which allows us to access a lot of other federations as part of eduGAIN as well. If the client is completely new to OpenAthens, there's also some setup that needs to be done on their side. So I generally will act as a liaison between OpenAthens and the client to make sure they get an account set up, get access to their admin portal.
PATRICK JORDAN: And in some cases, Silverchair has also given an account in order to go in and set up their configuration for them and point it to our various handlers and endpoints. If they're not new to OpenAthens, then generally they would already have an existing live configuration. So we work with them to set up a separate instance so that we don't disturb access on any of their current sites until the actual cut over and launch day is ready to go. Along with that, there's usually a fair amount of data transfer that's required and migration from the client's old system.
PATRICK JORDAN: All of the institutions need to be in our system. And each institution generally has what we call an entity ID, which is a unique parameter to them associated with their OpenAthens account. And it's what allows us to log them in correctly under the right institution. So as far as how OpenAthens work with the AAP build, as I mentioned, it was a little unique migrating two sites at once into one single instance of OpenAthens.
PATRICK JORDAN: And in both versions of OpenAthens were slightly different between the two sites. So some of the gaps there that, again, Alfred touched on, some where the WAYFless URLs and deep linking. So the base sort of set up of OpenAthens that Silverchair offers involves a user coming to the site, going to an institutional sign-in page, and having to sign in via their institution and select OpenAthens as the option they're signing in as.
PATRICK JORDAN: That's if no other access option has been set up such as IP authentication or referring URL. And so one advantage of the WAYFless URL setup is that we're able to log users in automatically when coming from their institution. And so that way, if I'm a student or a researcher at a university and I'm viewing content that is hosted on the APP site, there are links that the librarians are able to set up on their side that passes various parameters.
PATRICK JORDAN: That entity ID I mentioned earlier being one of them that then goes to our handler and allows us to identify where that person is coming from and log them in as that institution. So the first step in that process is, OK, I've automatically logged in the user. That's a good start. They don't have to go through any sort of secondary login process.
PATRICK JORDAN: But now the full circle is can we get them to the content they want? And we're already viewing on their institution's side. And that's where the deep linking comes into play. So again, one of the parameters that librarians are able to set up and configure in these URLs is the specific piece of content that the user clicked the link from and it's trying to view. So enable to kind of come full circle, the ideal scenario here is the user gets automatically authenticated via OpenAthens as their institution.
PATRICK JORDAN: And they land on the article or book that they are actually trying to view. And at that point, once they're authenticated on the Silverchair platform, they have access to anything that-- any subscriptions that institution has as well. And so ideally, the library is linking to things that they've already owned or purchased. And the user is able to view the full text, download PDFs, and take advantage of any other features of the content at that time.
PATRICK JORDAN: So I mentioned earlier, we've had quite a few integrations with OpenAthens at this point. And some of the challenges when working on a new build is that your site is not live and open to the world. It's behind server restrictions that can sometimes block communications with third parties and make it a little bit hard to do testing and make sure everything's set up correctly. Luckily, OpenAthens is able to provide some test metadata, which kind of allows us to hit attest services and do things on our side to make sure everything looks OK.
PATRICK JORDAN: They also do some testing on their end to make sure everything looks right so that we're ready to go ahead of any-- go live and switch over. And in the AAP migration in particular, Alfred and his team were very useful in providing a lot of different use cases for making sure that new features around deep linking and WAYFless URLs had been executed and built correctly. So I think this was a really good example of a great collaboration and one that worked out pretty well.
PATRICK JORDAN: And I think Alfred, you said no news is good news, but it sounds like folks are able to utilize these new features on your end. And they're working as we expect. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Hannah, who can provide a little bit more context within the industry.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah, thank you so much, Patrick. This has been, I think, really helpful to talk about OpenAthens, how the implementation worked with AAP, and how that actually looked behind the scenes as that was built out. And as Phil and Alfred have pointed out, access control is a very customized thing. It has had a long run, and we are still using some of those oldest versions of technology on publishing platforms.
HANNAH HECKNER: So as you heard with-- as Patrick was talking through the approach to building out OpenAthens implementations, we really don't want to have a one-size-fits-all approach to an OpenAthens implementation. We want to make sure that the platform is providing or serving really as a consultant and having the best toolkit possible. So as the director of product strategy at Silverchair, I'm really trying to listen to the industry, listen to our current publishers, listen to our perspective future publishers about how we can develop the Silverchair platform to best meet their needs today and into the future so that we can be strategic partners in meeting business needs, in meeting organizational mission-driven needs.
HANNAH HECKNER: So what that looks like in regards to OpenAthens is really making sure that we have those sharpened tools within our toolkit. If we hear that OpenAthens is expanding to have different drivers that we need to have easy implementations to on the platform level, all work to make sure that development is pushed through so that when we have new migrations coming on or new clients wanting to take advantage of OpenAthens, we'll say there will be customizations that we'll have to do that will meet your specific access control settings, your federation needs.
HANNAH HECKNER: We have open eyes to what those customizations might be but have the right tools on our side to really make that as easy as possible. So yeah, I think that's pretty much the platform a level perspective to how we want to approach these OpenAthens implementations. So Jane, did we want to maybe see if there's any questions that we want to address?
JANE CHARLTON: Yeah, thank you, Patrick and Hannah. That was a great run through of the support that Silverchair and OpenAthens provide to publishers. I thought maybe we could have a general discussion around user experiences. Patrick mentioned some of the challenges. Maybe we can draw out some specific examples there. And then what the next steps are for the American Academy of Pediatrics and for the Silverchair and OpenAthens relationship.
JANE CHARLTON: So maybe we could just start with user experience. And just maybe the panel could say a little bit about any changes they've seen or in terms of user experiences since this work was done.
PHIL LEAHY: OK, I'll go ahead. Sorry, we got echo that-- OK, we're good. Right, sorry. Sorry about the echo. Well, both Patrick and Alfred mentioned deep linking. And my goodness, I think in the last five years, deep linking requests have really shot to the top of the requests that come in from librarians.
PHIL LEAHY: Alfred mentioned that the myriad of third-party discovery services that institutions will often use. And they like to populate those discovery services with very targeted links to really lead their users towards the content they want. And so deep thinking is incredibly important. Alfred mentioned our redirector tool, which was-- it really just started as a development project really just to see if we could produce a scalable way of propagating links.
PHIL LEAHY: And it's turned into the single most important feature that we produce probably in the last 5 or 10 years. It's just incredible. We're all about-- as I said in my piece, it's all about implementing the technology most efficiently as possible. But just shaving off friction, just shaving off tiny bits of friction here and there.
PHIL LEAHY: And the redirector and populated with deep links that-- to be fair, we've built it, and publishers and platform providers have come. It needs a little bit of development work on their site to build the deep links that can support that seamless user journey. And that's why that's a great example of how publishers, platform partners, and federation operators like OpenAthens are working together to really make it as streamlined a user journey as possible.
PHIL LEAHY:
JANE CHARLTON: Thank you, Phil. So we do have a question actually from Linda [INAUDIBLE],, who's asked, what was particularly unique or different about AAP's implementation of federated access on the new platform? Who would like to take that question?
PATRICK JORDAN: I'll take a stab at that just having seen quite a few OpenAthens implementations. Again, sort of the base offering is that--
JANE CHARLTON: Patrick
PATRICK JORDAN: Yep. We're good?
JANE CHARLTON: Yeah.
PATRICK JORDAN: Sort of the base offering is a sign-in page that a user has to go to and actually manually sign in. And so AAP was actually the first implementation I've seen us do the WAYFless and the deep linking. And so those were new challenges to us. OpenAthens was great, providing a lot of documentation on how those services work. Again, I mentioned use cases. On Alfred side, he was actually able to procure us some actual institutional credentials that they were nice enough to share in order for us to actually go to their library, view resources on their side, click the links, look at how they go through the handlers to develop and integrate properly based on what was being sent to us.
PATRICK JORDAN: So it was great to see the loop close, so we weren't coding in the dark there.
JANE CHARLTON: Thank you. Whoops.
PHIL LEAHY: [INAUDIBLE]
JANE CHARLTON: Yeah, just a follow on question to Alfred, again, around user experience, what you've seen since migrating across to Silverchair with both of those into that one unique platform
ALFRED GOZUN: So as we mentioned before, in my particular role, most of the interactions we have is when there's-- users are stuck or there is an issue. But having less of those is actually a good thing, just pretty much confirming that the new implementation is actually working. And even with additional requests that-- if we need support or to check on-- OpenAthens' staff has always been very helpful as far as answering any kind of-- confirming any reasons why certain things aren't working as intended or providing any type of resources on the website that we can provide to the librarians if it's something that's a new kind of experience or instance that we haven't run into.
ALFRED GOZUN: But we haven't actually had too many. Basically, now that we have everything in place, everything seems to be where we have-- pretty much we're able to provide the federated redirectors. And we provided documentation for the librarians to do that themselves as well. OpenAthens the has a nice tool where it actually utilizes the information.
ALFRED GOZUN: Just based off the organization's name, it's able to configure that structure for them and then just putting in that specific target URL where they want that to direct. And then it automatically generates that. And we provide that to our customers. So a lot of that streamlined. Now that everything has been confirmed to be working with a deep linking especially, everything has all come around full circle.
ALFRED GOZUN: And for the experience, we have more with just a streamlined way of interacting without having do any trial or error type of thing or do additional troubleshooting. We already have things that already were familiar that should we-- we're expected to be working. And again, OpenAthens and Silverchair has always been helpful if we do over come anything outside of what we're normally dealing with or new scenarios.
PHIL LEAHY: Well, I guess one other thing I'd add as well on challenges or potentially sidestepping challenges, and I think this is something that we did do with AAP, is communicating these changes in advance. And again, getting back to these deep links that are populated in a bunch of third-party platforms that neither we, Silverchair, or AAP as an example publisher have any direct control over whatsoever. Librarians need to know about these changes in advance.
PHIL LEAHY: And so by working with publishers, we can publicize the changes, tell them when to change their links and which day that the migration-- especially in a case like AAP where they're changing from one platform partner to another. Links syntaxes are changing. Certainly, our redirector tool can do a whole bunch of heavy lifting there because AAP and Silverchair will prepopulate that the linking tools that we have in the service.
PHIL LEAHY: But again, that stuff needs to be propagated into those third-party discovery services. And so by working with publishers, we can make sure librarians are ahead of the game. We all know that they're time and resource poor. So the more notice they get, then they can synchronize the changes on their side, which means that users don't notice any change whatsoever from one day to the next.
PATRICK JORDAN: Yeah, you're exactly right, Phil. It may seem like magic to the end user, but the institution does have to do some work there to get those links set up properly. And that's definitely part of what the process that we went through. Once our testing was complete, we made sure that the communication went out around how the links needed to be formatted to get over to us correctly.
PATRICK JORDAN:
JANE CHARLTON: Thank you. And we've talked a bit about a lot of the challenges. So maybe we could now go on to talk about next steps for AAP, for Silverchair, and for OpenAthens. Phil.
PHIL LEAHY: OK, yeah, I'll go first. Sure. So just in terms of the release process, Patrick was very kind and said that the testing and implementation and release process went well. But we are looking to show you-- again, shaving friction. We are looking to improve the way that publishers do onboard new or existing upgrades to existing products within the OpenAthens federation.
PHIL LEAHY: So in the next-- within the next few weeks, we're going to be releasing a change. It's more of a framework. There are going to be elements within our publisher dashboard that will change to enable this stuff to happen smoothly. We'll be publicizing that. We'll be putting documentation out about that. But again, we're looking to lighten the load on publishers. And we're loosely calling it our test federation.
PHIL LEAHY: So in an ideal world, it will reduce maybe one or two metadata uploads or what have you, which can be-- it can be complex when either a platform partner or a publisher has staging pre-production environments and what have you. They've got change control processes on their side that need to be observed. We're looking to take some of those hops out of the loop as well.
PHIL LEAHY: So we're hoping to get that out. There's been a handover just this week to the service desk. So they know what to expect and we'll be releasing that stuff into the publish dashboard in the next couple of weeks.
JANE CHARLTON: Thank you, Phil.
PHIL LEAHY: Sorry.
JANE CHARLTON: Anything from Silverchair or from AAP on next steps.
HANNAH HECKNER: If there are specific next steps for the AAP implementation, I'll look to Alfred and Patrick to offer those. But I will just say that in thinking about the long-term pathway for scholarly publishing platforms, I think it's really interesting to think about the new opportunities for access control. And Phil's talked a lot about decreasing the friction in that log in. And I also like to think a lot about how there's going to be expectations put on scholarly publishing that have maybe been placed upon more news media organizations.
HANNAH HECKNER: So do we have a future where you can use your Gmail login to read content on a scholarly platform? I don't know about that. But I think it really is interesting to think about the importance of federated access as we are experiencing an increasingly off campus world. And we're also hearing from some of our publishers who have more corporate institutional customers where they used to have all of their employees in the same IP range.
HANNAH HECKNER: That's not the case anymore. So can they leverage some of these federations that have been active in academic institutions for a while? Like can those corporations leverage that same technology to have this frictionless access experience for their users? They don't want to be relying on referring URLs that are hidden on a SharePoint somewhere. So I think it's really-- it'll be really wonderful to strengthen this partnership with our publishers who are seeking to solve these problems with OpenAthens and other similar organizations who are providing those solutions to just create more dynamic and seemingly magical solutions for access in the future.
JANE CHARLTON: Thank you, Hannah. Phil.
PHIL LEAHY: Yeah, I'll go at. So your social logging, yeah, you're right. We could spend another hour talking about that. But our CTO likes to hold up his mobile phone and say, Netflix knows who I am just off this one device, why can't we offer the site the same thing? There's a couple of aspects to this. And I'm going to try not to go on too long about. It in the current framework-- in my slides, I'll talk about-- talked about federation being a trust fabric.
PHIL LEAHY: And the trust is established by all eligible users being recognized members of an organization, employee, student, researcher, what have you. And that organization is asserting trust into the federation. And by extension saying to AAP, I'm vouching for this user. They are genuine member of my organization because they're in their central directory for the most part. But joining with a Gmail account, well, will the university of Minnesota let any random user hook into their directory service with a Gmail account?
PHIL LEAHY: It's not impossible, but it does bring up all sorts of trust issues. However, I also talked about SAML being 20-year-old technology. OpenID Connect is widely being talked about as the next generation of access management technology. Much more flexible and developers love it because it's so much easier to implement than SAML. As OpenID Connect comes closer to this ecosystem here, then potentially much more additional logging options, Facebook or any kind of social-- or Gmail type nugget.
PHIL LEAHY: It becomes much more possible, but the trust issue is the main one. You will trust those users because you know they're coming from a specific university, pharmaceutical company, whatever. That trust layer needs to be built using-- but hooking in other technologies safely and securely.
JANE CHARLTON: Thank you, Phil. That's really interesting. I have a now for Alfred. So if another publisher was interested in this type of service, what would you say to them about-- what would you recommend to them starting out on this process?
ALFRED GOZUN: For me, I would say it's been a great journey from my own personal understanding of how these type of access methodologies are worked. So whatever resources that you can look into, if you have your customers working and they have their own contact with OpenAthens, that's been actually very helpful as far as my understanding and gaining knowledge to where I am now, how everything works.
ALFRED GOZUN: So even directly with some of the sales team staff in OpenAthens like Kieran was able to clarify some of the things as we were going through, things that we wanted to move forward with our migration to our current platforms. So for any other publishers that are looking into understanding that-- OpenAthens has been a great resource just in general for understanding just all the complexities that are involved.
ALFRED GOZUN: Again, that's one area that-- it's been interesting. I opened my eyes to certain things. I think we were mentioning a lot of the things that as a user, you're just seeing it. It seems like it just works seamlessly. It's like magic, but there's a lot of backend configurations that are-- I still haven't really been able to really grasp, but I do my best to try to keep up with.
ALFRED GOZUN: So as far as that, though, anything that's going forward, touching back up on the advancements, I know there's new things that have been thrown out like R-- is it the RA, RA 60 or RA 20-- some other type of authentications. I don't know how that goes into play or--
PHIL LEAHY: RA 21, is that--
ALFRED GOZUN: RA 21, is that-- yeah, so I've seen that thrown out. I don't know if that's still a newer thing. But if OpenAthens is also working to intertwine it together.
PHIL LEAHY: Yeah, so I talked about Seamless Access at the very end of my presentation. RA 21 was one of the research project. Seamless Access is the production phase of that same project. So again, just about creating a more coherent user journey that a whole range of publishers are all buying into because they recognize-- the elephant in the room with [INAUDIBLE] really it's like users were giving up.
PHIL LEAHY: Any time they saw any kind of logging challenge, they're giving up because it's like, oh, I really can't be bothered. And I'll just go and get it for free. Even though their institution maybe had bought the content that they were turning away from. So Seamless Access is all about creating, again, a consistent set of visual cues that users will recognize across a range of products.
PHIL LEAHY: And so therefore will be more likely to use legitimate resources rather than pirated ones.
ALFRED GOZUN: Thank you, Phil. It's exactly what I was mentioning, that you're very knowledgeable resources whenever topics come up. It's just you've been able to clarify everything. And touching up on what you're saying with the Seamless Access, that's something that I understand that Silverchair has a way of being able to integrate as well. Is that something that's something utilizing the Wayfinder service with OpenAthens, or is it a separate type of--
PHIL LEAHY: I think that's something Silverchair is doing independently. Again that's the beauty of Seamless Access. It doesn't require buy into a specific technology. Hannah, you should probably take over here.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah, so we support on our platform level the standard implementation of Seamless Access. So that would then require the publisher working with Seamless Access making sure they're set up in the backend. And then we would turn it on in the front end, make sure that all of that backend entitlement information is being passed through. And then it'll be live to your readers. That is a very top level explanation, but our publishers can speak with their director of product delivery about what that would involve.
ALFRED GOZUN: Yeah, from what I understand-- my understanding is that it's kind of like a bridge between a WAYFless and WAYFless URL experience. It's still involves you-- it doesn't directly take you, but it kind of streamlines it where you don't have to always select the organization. It remembers where you came from--
HANNAH HECKNER: Exactly.
ALFRED GOZUN: The last session.
JANE CHARLTON: Yeah, that's correct. And Wayfinder organizational tool does integrate with the Seamless Access service, so it makes it even more seamless. I think we're coming to the end of our webinar now. So I just want to quickly share this screen with you. Here we go. So if you're interested in any of the work that you've heard about today, if you could please get in touch with us, especially if you're thinking of doing any kind of platform migration, so please do contact us at OpenAthens.
JANE CHARLTON: Just want to say a huge thank you to all our speakers today. If you have any questions around migrating to Silverchair specifically, then there's an email address there. Otherwise, if it's about OpenAthens' implementation, do email us at contact@openathens.net. So thank you everybody, and have a great day.
HANNAH HECKNER: Thanks, everyone.
ALFRED GOZUN: Thank you, everyone.
Segment:0 .
JANE CHARLTON: Hello, everyone. And welcome to today's webinar, Streamlining Access to Your Users. This is a joint webinar with OpenAthens, Silverchair, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. I'm Jane Charlton, international marketing manager at OpenAthens. And I'll be facilitating today's webinar. So during the webinar, we'll be discussing the challenges, the solutions, and the benefits around how content platform migrations affect your access models.
JANE CHARLTON: OpenAthens and Silverchair have collaborated on a number of software integrations recently. And you'll hear from the American Academy of Pediatrics who will tell us a little bit about their experiences and the business benefits of working with us on the launch of their unified publication portal. But before we get started, I just want to run through some housekeeping stuff with you guys.
JANE CHARLTON: So first of all, we are recording the webinar. And anyone who's registered will receive the recording link after the webinar. If you have a question for our panel of speakers, please post these in the Q&A box. If you have any more general queries, maybe technical issues, for example, if you can please post those separately in the chat. We also have live captioning on.
JANE CHARLTON: So for people who are hard of hearing or deaf, you can enable the live transcript as we run through the webinar. So just want to give you a quick introduction to today's speakers. We have Alfred Gozun, who is application support specialist at AAP, Hannah Heckner, director of product strategy at Silverchair, Patrick Gordon-- Jordan, sorry, lead build business analyst also from Silverchair, and Phil Leahy, key client Services Manager from OpenAthens.
JANE CHARLTON: And just to quickly run through the running order for today's webinar. So Phil will kick off with an introduction to federated single sign-on and OpenAthens for publishers. Alfred will then follow with how OpenAthens supports AAP's business models and business needs. And then we'll hear from Patrick and Hannah, who will discuss software integration and how OpenAthens supports direct links to content.
JANE CHARLTON: And then we'll have a general discussion around user experiences, how we've overcome any challenges during the project and next steps. And then finally, at the end there'll be an opportunity for you to ask your questions to our speaker panel. So without further ado, I'll now hand over to Phil Leahy.
PHIL LEAHY: Hi, everybody. Mute your speak speaker. OK, I think we've managed to sort that out. So good afternoon, good morning wherever you are. It's nice to be here to talk to you about OpenAthens and Silverchair and how publishers all work together. So first thing to say is that OpenAthens, we've been providing services to the academic community for over two decades.
PHIL LEAHY: Our core mission remains unchanged, and that is to remove barriers to content. And so although we're kind of ancient in technology terms or at least our origins, we do remain the leaders in what is admittedly a very niche space. OpenAthens continues to exist because access management is complex. And it's not simply a case of "implementing the technology," quote unquote.
PHIL LEAHY: There's much more to it than that. And here's an approximate timeline of all the elements that are in the mix right now. So IP recognition, which obviously has been a thing since 1974, is the origin of that technology. And then right through that timeline, so what was then called Athens was released in 1996 originally. Hence, the recent birthday.
PHIL LEAHY: EZProxy shortly after that, and then SAML in 2002. And this is a good depiction of the journey that publishers and libraries have been through over this period and also, where the challenges that we face arise from. Much of this access management and subscription world is heavily reliant on proxy services and IP address recognition as well as VPNs in some cases as well. And these will probably be in place for a little while yet.
PHIL LEAHY: But let's not kid ourselves, these are aging technologies, some of them. And they were never designed for authentication in the first place. So it's interesting to see that although SAML is now 20 years old, it's still the standard today. But its age goes some way to explaining why it is complex in the eyes of many implementers. So getting down to how OpenAthens operates in the access management world, this is a cross-section of our customer base.
PHIL LEAHY: So although this stuff really did start in the education sector, in academic and research sectors, OpenAthens has really made SAML and SAML-based access management technologies available to a much wider set of markets to the point where the academic and research market actually now represents less than half of our institutional customer base. The reason for that, for the other half essentially is that most of those or the rest of your customer base, they're not eligible to join their national access management federation.
PHIL LEAHY: And so a massive gap opened up in the market when federations were first released. And we realized that we could help publishers maximize the investment that they were making in some of these technologies and make it available to other customer types, not just the academic and research sector. So here are some of those elements that we were talking about before.
PHIL LEAHY: Proxy solutions, as I said, it's been-- I think when I first started with the service back in the year 2000, well, I was told the IP recognition was probably on its way out. So that clearly hasn't been the case. But as time has gone on, they have become increasingly fragile that the stanzas have always required regular attention and, I think, arguably more so as publisher products get more complex.
PHIL LEAHY: And they're just no longer suitable as an access management solution anymore. Alternative SAML applications are in place, typically, peer-to-peer connections, but they're inefficient. They're typically built one per customer, a direct connection, as the name implies, between customer and publisher. But they're difficult to set up and maintain.
PHIL LEAHY: They need at least second level technical expertise on the publisher side. And on the library side, they might not access-- be able to call on that kind of technical expertise to open up the pipe if you like it therein. And it's therefore expensive for everybody. And for publishers, it's eating into their margin. There's no way that it should be that difficult to set up access by SAML.
PHIL LEAHY: So publishers are increasingly choosing federated access because it's one implementation with multiple uses, ie, many thousands of customers can connect to a single federated implementation. It's part of a trusted network of entities. And what that means is that with SAML metadata underpinning everything, there's a trust fabric right there. So you don't need to-- your customers don't need to revalidate you as a vendor every single time they want to onboard your products or take out a new subscription.
PHIL LEAHY: And onboarding on the publisher side, it's managed by customer service teams, not second line support. So it's a much more efficient use of a publisher's resources. No metadata exchange required on a peer-to-peer basis. And this improves security as well. So if there's a single user is hammering your product with what possibly scripted logins, for example, with IP recognition, you have to block the entire organization in order to address that.
PHIL LEAHY: With SAML, you get a unique identifier for the user to-- and you can block them rather than everybody else at that same organization. [COUGHS] excuse me. And as a result of widening the participation in the access management ecosystem, if you like, we see a massive rise in traffic. So just over six years ago, we were-- so we were seeing just under 2 million transfers per month in 2016.
PHIL LEAHY: And fast-forward to February 2022, and it's now over 16 million transfers per month. So there's been multiple orders of magnitude in terms of growth. And then just to finish up, the next application of SAML ecosystem is Seamless Access. So publishers have been implementing SAML federated access management in a roughly coherent and sort of-- but not necessarily coordinated way.
PHIL LEAHY: Different development teams have been doing things slightly differently and then ultimately presenting the user journey in different ways. Seamless Access is intended to put together a much more coherent user journey so that users see consistent visual cues regardless of the product that they are accessing. And OpenAthens has been on the committees for Seamless Access since its inception.
PHIL LEAHY: And from there, I'm going to hand over to Alfred, I believe.
ALFRED GOZUN: Thank you, Phil, for the overview and an explanation for the OpenAthens. So I actually will be going ahead. And just as a brief introduction to myself, my name is Alfred Gozun. I'm an application support specialist with the American Academy of Pediatrics. So in my role, I'm speaking and assisting our customers directly as far as their needs. And when it comes to the actual OpenAthens implementation, as Phil alluded to, a lot of them is dealing with librarians in different industries.
ALFRED GOZUN: So I can further expand on that. I can go ahead and start sharing my screen. So just give me one moment. Is everyone able to see my slides?
PHIL LEAHY: Yes, we can.
ALFRED GOZUN: OK, thank you. So I apologize. I've been looking off a little bit-- the other screen is on the side here. OK, so again, as I alluded to, the sectors that I've noticed a lot that Phil also alluded to was the education sector, which is the universities and the health care networks. I did also note that Phil mentioned some government sectors as well, which we've also had experience with assisting the health departments libraries.
ALFRED GOZUN: But as far as the university and health care networks, is the main bulk of what we deal with. And we are assisting, as far as university access, maybe students who are trying to access certain contents through the university's library catalogs. We offer resources that the university is able to provide through their library catalog. So OpenAthens is one way that they allow that access when they're searching through the library's catalog to be taken directly to that resource and get authenticated.
ALFRED GOZUN: And OpenAthens is one of the factors that helps streamline that process for the libraries and their patrons. So moving on to the next. How is the standardization of OpenAthens authentication process allowed for flexibility to support various configurations for the librarians? So with the librarians, they have different options to configure their catalog.
ALFRED GOZUN: So the nice thing with OpenAthens is that most of the major providers for laying out the catalog is supported with this OpenAthens authentication. So I've given some examples of some of those systems that are being used. ExLibris is one that Texas Medical Center libraries, one of the customers that we've assisted that uses ExLibris. Ovid is another one that is utilized with OpenAthens.
ALFRED GOZUN: And Indiana University Health Medical Library is the example that I remember working as far as with that. And Wolters Kluwer is another one. I couldn't think of a direct example but that's another one that I'm familiar with as well. And I also included the company intranet sites. I don't know, this hasn't come up too often, but I just wanted to make a point of that. There was an organization that I was assisting and troubleshooting that I was able to test.
ALFRED GOZUN: And it looked like they had their log in portal coming through a Microsoft login Active Directory. So just to show that it's compatible with multiple configurations for the library. And so if they're setting it up through Microsoft Active Directory or through one of the service providers for their Alma systems, OpenAthens is very flexible and allows as far as that because of their experience overall, just being able to optimize and refine everything to suit to all the different configurations.
ALFRED GOZUN: And next is how has the standardization of OpenAthens authentication process allowed for flexibility to provide support among various platforms for publishers? So similar to how the librarians have different options, publishers also have different ways that they can decide on how to present and provide access to their content. So again, OpenAthens is very diverse and as far as versatile in allowing the seamless compatibility between multiple content hose.
ALFRED GOZUN: So this actually can be seen in our own experience with the American Academy of Pediatrics as we-- prior to our current platform, we actually had our resources split up into two vendors. And we were able to provide access through OpenAthens on both platforms. So the way it was set up previously was that the AAP journals and ebooks were hosted by HighWire Press.
ALFRED GOZUN: And the way that we were able to allocate or provide access to those versus allocating the unique OpenAthens organization ID, and that determined which organization-- identified which organization was attempting authentication and was able to process through that. And then the other side of that was our AAP point of care solutions products which this was hosted by Silverchair. And that uses the Shibboleth configuration to identify the organization.
ALFRED GOZUN: So there's separate area parameters with entity ID and scope which we are able to configure on our access management system with Silverchair to help get that authentication through OpenAthens. And what are the most requested features asked by customers for providing access through OpenAthens? So I was able to pinpoint three of the main requests.
ALFRED GOZUN: The first being the ability to provide authentication through the SAML protocol, which Phil again, he touched up on with as far as advantages of having SAML protocols in place. The one thing that I've gotten from that is that for the librarians and our customers side, it's just an easier way for maintenance. They won't have to worry about maintaining too many different types of URLs.
ALFRED GOZUN: There's a standard syntax that we're able to utilize for OpenAthens. And also the credentials are pretty much isolated for just-- to be able to handle different platforms. So the single sign-on implementation for that is an advantage for SAML. And then the next is ability to authenticate and direct users to the resources with WAYFless URL. And WAYFless URL is important because typically, if you don't have a support for WAYFless URLs, if you're trying to maybe go to resources from a library catalog, and it will direct you-- before it takes you to the actual content, without WAYFless, you will have-- it will be challenged to validate where you're coming from.
ALFRED GOZUN: And you have to select-- There was a screenshot in Phil's presentation that showed where you wouldn't have to select the federation and the organization. So that cuts the session a little bit because the users will have to worry about one extra thing. So WAYFless URL support is one thing that was requested because that completely bypasses the need for users to have to select automatically based off of the configuration.
ALFRED GOZUN: It will already know where they're authenticating from and just go forward with that. And then the last one that has been requested is the ability to provide authentication and the direct to users with deep link targets. So what deep link targets is-- for an example, again, if users are searching for specific topics, they could be presented with multiple resources from different publishers.
ALFRED GOZUN: And maybe one of our journal articles comes up, a specific article that they would like to go to. The link ideally would direct them directly to that article. And that is what-- it was referred as before the article link or deep link. So without that support or that capability, if a user clicks on a link for a specific article, but it doesn't take him to the article, maybe just take them to the home page of the publisher's site, then the user will still have to take extra time on their end to navigate through the interface of the publisher's website, which they're probably not familiar with the first time they're being directed to.
ALFRED GOZUN: So having that deep link support was very important as far as being able to have that ability to have users directed straight to their resources without any extra work on the user's end. And how is the integration of OpenAthens and implantation by Silverchair on AAP Publications address the request? So going back to that the SAML authentication because it's easier maintenance for the librarians because they have to only worry about a specific syntax.
ALFRED GOZUN: So I had an example. This is basically-- they call it-- also referred to as go link because in the prefix, you can see that it has the go and then-- But the main thing is that the librarians only-- when they set up links on their catalog for different resources, they would only have to really worry about this area that's in brackets where they would just-- the scope is determined by the organization's profile in OpenAthens.
ALFRED GOZUN: And then the target URL is basically what resource-- if it's an article, this link to the specific article for that publisher. So again, they can use deep links with this federated redirector as well because it's supported with deep links. And as far as the end for the WAYFless side where it allows users to bypass selecting where they're coming from, this is something that's configured on the service provider dashboard for the publishers.
ALFRED GOZUN: And this is an example of how we have our setup. I think is more of a set it and forget it type thing. So once you have this in place, it looks like that they pretty much coordinate as far as what this director from the library page, it will work together with the publisher's service dashboard to do all the work in the background. So it will just do all the handshake and authentication without the user really having to worry about what's going on in.
ALFRED GOZUN: And they'll just get their authentication and be directed to the resource as their intended. And so how does this all translate into the optimal experience for our customers and the users? Again, by not having to worry about multiple different formats of links, having that standardized federated redirector syntax will allow the libraries to easily create links for multiple resources using that same syntax.
ALFRED GOZUN: And they just have to pretty much configure that target URL. And everything else as far as the authentication is handled through the other areas of the syntax of the URL. And as far as the users' end, again, this will allow them to just be able to search in their session, look up what they need to do. If they find something that interests them, they're just going to be able to click on the link for that article or ebook or whatever resource, and not have to worry about anything else on there.
ALFRED GOZUN: And it's automatically just going to determine where they're authenticating, if they have the access. And with the deep link capability, also, just take them straight to that specific article without having to worry about navigating anything extra. And how is the collaboration with OpenAthens and Silverchair carried over these capabilities and improved on solutions?
ALFRED GOZUN: So going back to our previous platform, when HighWire was the host for AAP journals and ebooks, we did have that full capability of having that federated URL with the WAYFless and deep links. So that was very important for us when we moved over the AAP journals and ebooks onto our current AAP Publications platform. And Silverchair was able to leverage that and apply that in its functional on our current platform.
ALFRED GOZUN: And what they also were able to do to expand on is the point of care solutions that we actually had on our whole platform. Had some limitations as far as the SAML-- the SAML was working, but it didn't support deep links. So again, that was one thing that we noticed being requested for that support because if users are going to a catalog and searching and they don't get directly to that article when they click on it, it's a little bit more confusing.
ALFRED GOZUN: And they have to do a little bit more time on their end to find the resource, instead of being directed properly. So we were able to expand on that. And now, it's capable to work on working on our point of care solutions as well on the current platform. And how's the new AAP Publications platform contributed to the evolution of supporting users through federated access?
ALFRED GOZUN: Again, so now that we have everything full support for all the products that we offer on this current platform, everything is pretty much-- from the old platform that people were requesting is now has been met. But we also did preserve that alternate authentication. I'm sorry I didn't touch on this, but on the old platform, the deep link support for SAML wasn't available, but there was that alternate option, which was through the proxy access.
ALFRED GOZUN: And Phil mentioned how proxy, there's the disadvantages that it has between that and the SAML. So obviously, that's why we were hoping to be able to provide deep links for the SAML part of it. But we did actually still preserve that proxy access in case there are users who aren't able to get their federated authentication to work or they're still using a proxy server configuration. So again, Phil did say that proxy method is still something that could be around for a while.
ALFRED GOZUN: So we've taken note of that and still allow that method to be available. And then as far as further evolution is extended the capability of configuring Shibboleth parameters to other federations. So the same type of configuration we have for allowing OpenAthens, it also will work with other federations that participate with eduGAIN. There are some in Italy, the IDEM, some in Germany and Malaysia that we've been able to add to our supported list of federations that we can provide access through.
ALFRED GOZUN: So that's something that was not actually available on the old platform. So it's one nice thing that we're able to provide now. Right now, it doesn't have the option for the WAYFless. So they would still have to go to a page where they select the federation and the organization, but it does support deep links. It's better than what we had before where didn't-- if people were asking from other federations and they didn't have, and they weren't part of OpenAthens, then there was wasn't anything that we could provide any type of solution.
ALFRED GOZUN: But now that we have that extended for other federations, that's one other thing that's been helpful for that. So that's basically how OpenAthens has helped and the American Academy of Pediatrics as far as their business needs. So I hope that information was helpful for you, anyone who's considering working with OpenAthens or even those that are already working with, maybe more familiarity with how you can maximize the features that are available to you.
ALFRED GOZUN: And with that, I'll go ahead and pass along--
JANE CHARLTON: Thank you, Alfred.
ALFRED GOZUN: Sure.
JANE CHARLTON: Thank you that was a really, really interesting and very detailed case study. So thank you for your time there. So I think if we can move on to Hannah and Patrick now from Silverchair. And if you have any questions that you'd like to ask our speakers, just a reminder to please pop those in the Q&A box. Thank you.
PATRICK JORDAN: All right, absolutely. Well, thank you everyone for joining. Again, my name is Patrick Jordan. And I'm the lead build business analyst over at Silverchair here. Just to set the scene a little bit with my role, I've been with the company for around 10 years now working specifically on migrations pretty much that entire time. So generally we're dealing with clients who are completely new to the Silverchair platform as well as existing internal clients that want to move their site over to what we call our platform from a more bespoke application.
PATRICK JORDAN: In the case of AAP, it was a pretty unique migration because we were actually doing both things at once. As Albert kind of touched on, we had an existing suite of AAP products called Solutions on sort of a custom bespoke site on our platform. And then they were bringing over their journals and books from another provider, so kind of migrating to sites at once into one single unified site as a one-stop shop. So my role specifically is mainly to work with clients to give them an overview of our platform offering, help them decide what existing features and services they want as well as integration such as OpenAthens.
PATRICK JORDAN: And then identify any gaps in their requirements from what the platform currently provides. And so whenever a gap is found, sometimes that can lead to custom development. Sometimes we're able to work with a product strategy, someone like Hannah, and get a feature built at the platform level. So it's something that all of our clients can benefit from. And so I think OpenAthens is a good example of that.
PATRICK JORDAN: And there were definitely some new features we got to build in as part of the AAP migration and utilize that, again, Alfred touched on with some of the WAYFless URLs and deep linking. As far as the build process itself, we're an agile shop. We work with Scrum teams, a handful of developers, a product owner, a tester, a business analyst like myself, and a Scrum master. And so generally, once this sort of initial phase is complete where we've identified all of the client requirements, we start actual development from that point on, help them set up their site.
PATRICK JORDAN: We work with the UI team to apply a client style guides and branding, and then start setting up all the various integrations that are needed along with that. So as far as how integrations work on the Silverchair platform, there's a wide range of services. Some of which can be turned on as simply as sort of flipping a switch, changing the configuration from false to true.
PATRICK JORDAN: And then there are a few that are a little bit more advanced. And I would put OpenAthens in that category, which is why we have such a strong relationship with them and try to keep really OpenAthens lanes of communication. Whenever a new build is in the works on our side, we try to give them a heads up early so that we can work together to get that integration in place. There's a fair amount that's involved with the OpenAthens' integration specifically.
PATRICK JORDAN: Silverchair treats them as a Shibboleth federation. So there's Shibboleth metadata that has to be set up, submitted to any comment on our side, which is the United States Federation and a partner of eduGAIN, which allows us to access a lot of other federations as part of eduGAIN as well. If the client is completely new to OpenAthens, there's also some setup that needs to be done on their side. So I generally will act as a liaison between OpenAthens and the client to make sure they get an account set up, get access to their admin portal.
PATRICK JORDAN: And in some cases, Silverchair has also given an account in order to go in and set up their configuration for them and point it to our various handlers and endpoints. If they're not new to OpenAthens, then generally they would already have an existing live configuration. So we work with them to set up a separate instance so that we don't disturb access on any of their current sites until the actual cut over and launch day is ready to go. Along with that, there's usually a fair amount of data transfer that's required and migration from the client's old system.
PATRICK JORDAN: All of the institutions need to be in our system. And each institution generally has what we call an entity ID, which is a unique parameter to them associated with their OpenAthens account. And it's what allows us to log them in correctly under the right institution. So as far as how OpenAthens work with the AAP build, as I mentioned, it was a little unique migrating two sites at once into one single instance of OpenAthens.
PATRICK JORDAN: And in both versions of OpenAthens were slightly different between the two sites. So some of the gaps there that, again, Alfred touched on, some where the WAYFless URLs and deep linking. So the base sort of set up of OpenAthens that Silverchair offers involves a user coming to the site, going to an institutional sign-in page, and having to sign in via their institution and select OpenAthens as the option they're signing in as.
PATRICK JORDAN: That's if no other access option has been set up such as IP authentication or referring URL. And so one advantage of the WAYFless URL setup is that we're able to log users in automatically when coming from their institution. And so that way, if I'm a student or a researcher at a university and I'm viewing content that is hosted on the APP site, there are links that the librarians are able to set up on their side that passes various parameters.
PATRICK JORDAN: That entity ID I mentioned earlier being one of them that then goes to our handler and allows us to identify where that person is coming from and log them in as that institution. So the first step in that process is, OK, I've automatically logged in the user. That's a good start. They don't have to go through any sort of secondary login process.
PATRICK JORDAN: But now the full circle is can we get them to the content they want? And we're already viewing on their institution's side. And that's where the deep linking comes into play. So again, one of the parameters that librarians are able to set up and configure in these URLs is the specific piece of content that the user clicked the link from and it's trying to view. So enable to kind of come full circle, the ideal scenario here is the user gets automatically authenticated via OpenAthens as their institution.
PATRICK JORDAN: And they land on the article or book that they are actually trying to view. And at that point, once they're authenticated on the Silverchair platform, they have access to anything that-- any subscriptions that institution has as well. And so ideally, the library is linking to things that they've already owned or purchased. And the user is able to view the full text, download PDFs, and take advantage of any other features of the content at that time.
PATRICK JORDAN: So I mentioned earlier, we've had quite a few integrations with OpenAthens at this point. And some of the challenges when working on a new build is that your site is not live and open to the world. It's behind server restrictions that can sometimes block communications with third parties and make it a little bit hard to do testing and make sure everything's set up correctly. Luckily, OpenAthens is able to provide some test metadata, which kind of allows us to hit attest services and do things on our side to make sure everything looks OK.
PATRICK JORDAN: They also do some testing on their end to make sure everything looks right so that we're ready to go ahead of any-- go live and switch over. And in the AAP migration in particular, Alfred and his team were very useful in providing a lot of different use cases for making sure that new features around deep linking and WAYFless URLs had been executed and built correctly. So I think this was a really good example of a great collaboration and one that worked out pretty well.
PATRICK JORDAN: And I think Alfred, you said no news is good news, but it sounds like folks are able to utilize these new features on your end. And they're working as we expect. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Hannah, who can provide a little bit more context within the industry.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah, thank you so much, Patrick. This has been, I think, really helpful to talk about OpenAthens, how the implementation worked with AAP, and how that actually looked behind the scenes as that was built out. And as Phil and Alfred have pointed out, access control is a very customized thing. It has had a long run, and we are still using some of those oldest versions of technology on publishing platforms.
HANNAH HECKNER: So as you heard with-- as Patrick was talking through the approach to building out OpenAthens implementations, we really don't want to have a one-size-fits-all approach to an OpenAthens implementation. We want to make sure that the platform is providing or serving really as a consultant and having the best toolkit possible. So as the director of product strategy at Silverchair, I'm really trying to listen to the industry, listen to our current publishers, listen to our perspective future publishers about how we can develop the Silverchair platform to best meet their needs today and into the future so that we can be strategic partners in meeting business needs, in meeting organizational mission-driven needs.
HANNAH HECKNER: So what that looks like in regards to OpenAthens is really making sure that we have those sharpened tools within our toolkit. If we hear that OpenAthens is expanding to have different drivers that we need to have easy implementations to on the platform level, all work to make sure that development is pushed through so that when we have new migrations coming on or new clients wanting to take advantage of OpenAthens, we'll say there will be customizations that we'll have to do that will meet your specific access control settings, your federation needs.
HANNAH HECKNER: We have open eyes to what those customizations might be but have the right tools on our side to really make that as easy as possible. So yeah, I think that's pretty much the platform a level perspective to how we want to approach these OpenAthens implementations. So Jane, did we want to maybe see if there's any questions that we want to address?
JANE CHARLTON: Yeah, thank you, Patrick and Hannah. That was a great run through of the support that Silverchair and OpenAthens provide to publishers. I thought maybe we could have a general discussion around user experiences. Patrick mentioned some of the challenges. Maybe we can draw out some specific examples there. And then what the next steps are for the American Academy of Pediatrics and for the Silverchair and OpenAthens relationship.
JANE CHARLTON: So maybe we could just start with user experience. And just maybe the panel could say a little bit about any changes they've seen or in terms of user experiences since this work was done.
PHIL LEAHY: OK, I'll go ahead. Sorry, we got echo that-- OK, we're good. Right, sorry. Sorry about the echo. Well, both Patrick and Alfred mentioned deep linking. And my goodness, I think in the last five years, deep linking requests have really shot to the top of the requests that come in from librarians.
PHIL LEAHY: Alfred mentioned that the myriad of third-party discovery services that institutions will often use. And they like to populate those discovery services with very targeted links to really lead their users towards the content they want. And so deep thinking is incredibly important. Alfred mentioned our redirector tool, which was-- it really just started as a development project really just to see if we could produce a scalable way of propagating links.
PHIL LEAHY: And it's turned into the single most important feature that we produce probably in the last 5 or 10 years. It's just incredible. We're all about-- as I said in my piece, it's all about implementing the technology most efficiently as possible. But just shaving off friction, just shaving off tiny bits of friction here and there.
PHIL LEAHY: And the redirector and populated with deep links that-- to be fair, we've built it, and publishers and platform providers have come. It needs a little bit of development work on their site to build the deep links that can support that seamless user journey. And that's why that's a great example of how publishers, platform partners, and federation operators like OpenAthens are working together to really make it as streamlined a user journey as possible.
PHIL LEAHY:
JANE CHARLTON: Thank you, Phil. So we do have a question actually from Linda [INAUDIBLE],, who's asked, what was particularly unique or different about AAP's implementation of federated access on the new platform? Who would like to take that question?
PATRICK JORDAN: I'll take a stab at that just having seen quite a few OpenAthens implementations. Again, sort of the base offering is that--
JANE CHARLTON: Patrick
PATRICK JORDAN: Yep. We're good?
JANE CHARLTON: Yeah.
PATRICK JORDAN: Sort of the base offering is a sign-in page that a user has to go to and actually manually sign in. And so AAP was actually the first implementation I've seen us do the WAYFless and the deep linking. And so those were new challenges to us. OpenAthens was great, providing a lot of documentation on how those services work. Again, I mentioned use cases. On Alfred side, he was actually able to procure us some actual institutional credentials that they were nice enough to share in order for us to actually go to their library, view resources on their side, click the links, look at how they go through the handlers to develop and integrate properly based on what was being sent to us.
PATRICK JORDAN: So it was great to see the loop close, so we weren't coding in the dark there.
JANE CHARLTON: Thank you. Whoops.
PHIL LEAHY: [INAUDIBLE]
JANE CHARLTON: Yeah, just a follow on question to Alfred, again, around user experience, what you've seen since migrating across to Silverchair with both of those into that one unique platform
ALFRED GOZUN: So as we mentioned before, in my particular role, most of the interactions we have is when there's-- users are stuck or there is an issue. But having less of those is actually a good thing, just pretty much confirming that the new implementation is actually working. And even with additional requests that-- if we need support or to check on-- OpenAthens' staff has always been very helpful as far as answering any kind of-- confirming any reasons why certain things aren't working as intended or providing any type of resources on the website that we can provide to the librarians if it's something that's a new kind of experience or instance that we haven't run into.
ALFRED GOZUN: But we haven't actually had too many. Basically, now that we have everything in place, everything seems to be where we have-- pretty much we're able to provide the federated redirectors. And we provided documentation for the librarians to do that themselves as well. OpenAthens the has a nice tool where it actually utilizes the information.
ALFRED GOZUN: Just based off the organization's name, it's able to configure that structure for them and then just putting in that specific target URL where they want that to direct. And then it automatically generates that. And we provide that to our customers. So a lot of that streamlined. Now that everything has been confirmed to be working with a deep linking especially, everything has all come around full circle.
ALFRED GOZUN: And for the experience, we have more with just a streamlined way of interacting without having do any trial or error type of thing or do additional troubleshooting. We already have things that already were familiar that should we-- we're expected to be working. And again, OpenAthens and Silverchair has always been helpful if we do over come anything outside of what we're normally dealing with or new scenarios.
PHIL LEAHY: Well, I guess one other thing I'd add as well on challenges or potentially sidestepping challenges, and I think this is something that we did do with AAP, is communicating these changes in advance. And again, getting back to these deep links that are populated in a bunch of third-party platforms that neither we, Silverchair, or AAP as an example publisher have any direct control over whatsoever. Librarians need to know about these changes in advance.
PHIL LEAHY: And so by working with publishers, we can publicize the changes, tell them when to change their links and which day that the migration-- especially in a case like AAP where they're changing from one platform partner to another. Links syntaxes are changing. Certainly, our redirector tool can do a whole bunch of heavy lifting there because AAP and Silverchair will prepopulate that the linking tools that we have in the service.
PHIL LEAHY: But again, that stuff needs to be propagated into those third-party discovery services. And so by working with publishers, we can make sure librarians are ahead of the game. We all know that they're time and resource poor. So the more notice they get, then they can synchronize the changes on their side, which means that users don't notice any change whatsoever from one day to the next.
PATRICK JORDAN: Yeah, you're exactly right, Phil. It may seem like magic to the end user, but the institution does have to do some work there to get those links set up properly. And that's definitely part of what the process that we went through. Once our testing was complete, we made sure that the communication went out around how the links needed to be formatted to get over to us correctly.
PATRICK JORDAN:
JANE CHARLTON: Thank you. And we've talked a bit about a lot of the challenges. So maybe we could now go on to talk about next steps for AAP, for Silverchair, and for OpenAthens. Phil.
PHIL LEAHY: OK, yeah, I'll go first. Sure. So just in terms of the release process, Patrick was very kind and said that the testing and implementation and release process went well. But we are looking to show you-- again, shaving friction. We are looking to improve the way that publishers do onboard new or existing upgrades to existing products within the OpenAthens federation.
PHIL LEAHY: So in the next-- within the next few weeks, we're going to be releasing a change. It's more of a framework. There are going to be elements within our publisher dashboard that will change to enable this stuff to happen smoothly. We'll be publicizing that. We'll be putting documentation out about that. But again, we're looking to lighten the load on publishers. And we're loosely calling it our test federation.
PHIL LEAHY: So in an ideal world, it will reduce maybe one or two metadata uploads or what have you, which can be-- it can be complex when either a platform partner or a publisher has staging pre-production environments and what have you. They've got change control processes on their side that need to be observed. We're looking to take some of those hops out of the loop as well.
PHIL LEAHY: So we're hoping to get that out. There's been a handover just this week to the service desk. So they know what to expect and we'll be releasing that stuff into the publish dashboard in the next couple of weeks.
JANE CHARLTON: Thank you, Phil.
PHIL LEAHY: Sorry.
JANE CHARLTON: Anything from Silverchair or from AAP on next steps.
HANNAH HECKNER: If there are specific next steps for the AAP implementation, I'll look to Alfred and Patrick to offer those. But I will just say that in thinking about the long-term pathway for scholarly publishing platforms, I think it's really interesting to think about the new opportunities for access control. And Phil's talked a lot about decreasing the friction in that log in. And I also like to think a lot about how there's going to be expectations put on scholarly publishing that have maybe been placed upon more news media organizations.
HANNAH HECKNER: So do we have a future where you can use your Gmail login to read content on a scholarly platform? I don't know about that. But I think it really is interesting to think about the importance of federated access as we are experiencing an increasingly off campus world. And we're also hearing from some of our publishers who have more corporate institutional customers where they used to have all of their employees in the same IP range.
HANNAH HECKNER: That's not the case anymore. So can they leverage some of these federations that have been active in academic institutions for a while? Like can those corporations leverage that same technology to have this frictionless access experience for their users? They don't want to be relying on referring URLs that are hidden on a SharePoint somewhere. So I think it's really-- it'll be really wonderful to strengthen this partnership with our publishers who are seeking to solve these problems with OpenAthens and other similar organizations who are providing those solutions to just create more dynamic and seemingly magical solutions for access in the future.
JANE CHARLTON: Thank you, Hannah. Phil.
PHIL LEAHY: Yeah, I'll go at. So your social logging, yeah, you're right. We could spend another hour talking about that. But our CTO likes to hold up his mobile phone and say, Netflix knows who I am just off this one device, why can't we offer the site the same thing? There's a couple of aspects to this. And I'm going to try not to go on too long about. It in the current framework-- in my slides, I'll talk about-- talked about federation being a trust fabric.
PHIL LEAHY: And the trust is established by all eligible users being recognized members of an organization, employee, student, researcher, what have you. And that organization is asserting trust into the federation. And by extension saying to AAP, I'm vouching for this user. They are genuine member of my organization because they're in their central directory for the most part. But joining with a Gmail account, well, will the university of Minnesota let any random user hook into their directory service with a Gmail account?
PHIL LEAHY: It's not impossible, but it does bring up all sorts of trust issues. However, I also talked about SAML being 20-year-old technology. OpenID Connect is widely being talked about as the next generation of access management technology. Much more flexible and developers love it because it's so much easier to implement than SAML. As OpenID Connect comes closer to this ecosystem here, then potentially much more additional logging options, Facebook or any kind of social-- or Gmail type nugget.
PHIL LEAHY: It becomes much more possible, but the trust issue is the main one. You will trust those users because you know they're coming from a specific university, pharmaceutical company, whatever. That trust layer needs to be built using-- but hooking in other technologies safely and securely.
JANE CHARLTON: Thank you, Phil. That's really interesting. I have a now for Alfred. So if another publisher was interested in this type of service, what would you say to them about-- what would you recommend to them starting out on this process?
ALFRED GOZUN: For me, I would say it's been a great journey from my own personal understanding of how these type of access methodologies are worked. So whatever resources that you can look into, if you have your customers working and they have their own contact with OpenAthens, that's been actually very helpful as far as my understanding and gaining knowledge to where I am now, how everything works.
ALFRED GOZUN: So even directly with some of the sales team staff in OpenAthens like Kieran was able to clarify some of the things as we were going through, things that we wanted to move forward with our migration to our current platforms. So for any other publishers that are looking into understanding that-- OpenAthens has been a great resource just in general for understanding just all the complexities that are involved.
ALFRED GOZUN: Again, that's one area that-- it's been interesting. I opened my eyes to certain things. I think we were mentioning a lot of the things that as a user, you're just seeing it. It seems like it just works seamlessly. It's like magic, but there's a lot of backend configurations that are-- I still haven't really been able to really grasp, but I do my best to try to keep up with.
ALFRED GOZUN: So as far as that, though, anything that's going forward, touching back up on the advancements, I know there's new things that have been thrown out like R-- is it the RA, RA 60 or RA 20-- some other type of authentications. I don't know how that goes into play or--
PHIL LEAHY: RA 21, is that--
ALFRED GOZUN: RA 21, is that-- yeah, so I've seen that thrown out. I don't know if that's still a newer thing. But if OpenAthens is also working to intertwine it together.
PHIL LEAHY: Yeah, so I talked about Seamless Access at the very end of my presentation. RA 21 was one of the research project. Seamless Access is the production phase of that same project. So again, just about creating a more coherent user journey that a whole range of publishers are all buying into because they recognize-- the elephant in the room with [INAUDIBLE] really it's like users were giving up.
PHIL LEAHY: Any time they saw any kind of logging challenge, they're giving up because it's like, oh, I really can't be bothered. And I'll just go and get it for free. Even though their institution maybe had bought the content that they were turning away from. So Seamless Access is all about creating, again, a consistent set of visual cues that users will recognize across a range of products.
PHIL LEAHY: And so therefore will be more likely to use legitimate resources rather than pirated ones.
ALFRED GOZUN: Thank you, Phil. It's exactly what I was mentioning, that you're very knowledgeable resources whenever topics come up. It's just you've been able to clarify everything. And touching up on what you're saying with the Seamless Access, that's something that I understand that Silverchair has a way of being able to integrate as well. Is that something that's something utilizing the Wayfinder service with OpenAthens, or is it a separate type of--
PHIL LEAHY: I think that's something Silverchair is doing independently. Again that's the beauty of Seamless Access. It doesn't require buy into a specific technology. Hannah, you should probably take over here.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah, so we support on our platform level the standard implementation of Seamless Access. So that would then require the publisher working with Seamless Access making sure they're set up in the backend. And then we would turn it on in the front end, make sure that all of that backend entitlement information is being passed through. And then it'll be live to your readers. That is a very top level explanation, but our publishers can speak with their director of product delivery about what that would involve.
ALFRED GOZUN: Yeah, from what I understand-- my understanding is that it's kind of like a bridge between a WAYFless and WAYFless URL experience. It's still involves you-- it doesn't directly take you, but it kind of streamlines it where you don't have to always select the organization. It remembers where you came from--
HANNAH HECKNER: Exactly.
ALFRED GOZUN: The last session.
JANE CHARLTON: Yeah, that's correct. And Wayfinder organizational tool does integrate with the Seamless Access service, so it makes it even more seamless. I think we're coming to the end of our webinar now. So I just want to quickly share this screen with you. Here we go. So if you're interested in any of the work that you've heard about today, if you could please get in touch with us, especially if you're thinking of doing any kind of platform migration, so please do contact us at OpenAthens.
JANE CHARLTON: Just want to say a huge thank you to all our speakers today. If you have any questions around migrating to Silverchair specifically, then there's an email address there. Otherwise, if it's about OpenAthens' implementation, do email us at contact@openathens.net. So thank you everybody, and have a great day.
HANNAH HECKNER: Thanks, everyone.
ALFRED GOZUN: Thank you, everyone.
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Form Title Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts
The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts only work while you are in forms mode. By entering forms mode, you will be able to quickly access portions of the media player with single key commands.
Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
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Embed Size
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You Size - Responsive
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We Size - Responsive
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Picture Overlay Popup
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400 x 225
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512 x 288
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400 x 700
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768 x 1024
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1024 x 512
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1280 x 608
Form Title Cite
No citation provided.
Info
Segments
Related
Thumbnails
Exit Clip Mode
You have requested to see a portion of the video outside of the clip.
Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode