Events

Here are two past events with recordings that we highly recommend: Heather Flanagan spoke about “Browser Changes and the Impact on Federated Identity” at IAM online on Nov 11. A video recording is available here. Heather Staines gave an overview of both SeamlessAccess and GetFTR as part of the PubFactory Virtual Series 2021 on Oct 15; the recording can be found here.

And there’s more coming up!

• 8 Dec: STM Solutions Seminar will include a contribution on SeamlessAccess
• 14 Dec: Atypon webinar about GetFTR & SeamlessAccess

Internationalization – calling on your help!

Given the international character of research, it is not surprising that many of the digital products that integrate with SeamlessAccess serve a diverse and international user base. Several of these offer internationalization options, giving their users a choice in language that they would like to see and interact with. SeamlessAccess is devoted to providing users with an easy, intuitive access journey – which also means that we want to support the user in their language of choice.

Internationalization has been on our roadmap for some time, and today we are very pleased to announce that we are ready to start supporting other languages – and we are calling on your help to offer SeamlessAccess in your local language. If you are willing to support this effort, you can do that by contributing to the set of translations in our GitHub repository. If the language you would like to contribute to is not available yet, please create a .json file in the translations repository, where is the ISO 639-1 two-letter language code. For translation strings, please refer to the English version in the en.json file.

Extending the benefits of SeamlessAccess

SeamlessAccess is delighted with the recent adoption of the service by The HistoryMakers, a non-profit research and educational institution committed to preserving and making widely accessible the untold personal stories of both well-known and unsung African Americans.This integration is a significant milestone because it exemplifies how SeamlessAccess can provide value to a broad range of library users around the world and in a variety of use cases.

“Simplifying access is essential to our mission of making the HistoryMakers Digital Archive accessible to researchers and educators. By removing barriers to access, SeamlessAccess helps us showcase the breadth and depth of the accomplishments of individual African Americans”, said Julieanna Richardson, Founder and President of The HistoryMakers. Read more about it in our recent blog post.

Understanding Where-Are-You-From (WAYF) Challenges

The WAYF Entry Disambiguation Working Group has written a short white paper describing when and how users might be confused by the IdP Discovery WAYF service. Establishing the challenges in this space is the first step towards determining potential solutions for what will become a larger issue as federated authentication services proliferate.

Updates to Terms of Service

We’re making two minor changes to SeamlessAccess’ terms of service for reasons of transparency. First, we have added a sentence to clause 4.3 to more clearly describe the user experience review process before a new integration is released. This process helps to make sure that researchers will have a clear and consistent user experience when using SeamlessAccess across different applications. In addition, we’ve added “This is subject to change” to clause 6.7 to more clearly indicate that SeamlessAccess retains the freedom to move away from the current model of offering the (Beta) service for free to Service Providers in the future.

SeamlessAccess.org is a service designed to help streamline the online access experience for researchers using scholarly collaboration tools, information resources, and shared research infrastructure. This service is governed as a coalition between four organizations: GÉANT, Internet2, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), and the International Association of STM Publishers. Participants include researchers, service providers, libraries, identity providers, and federation operators. We’re excited to bring you up to date on the latest news.