Bringing communities together to advance federated identity for scholarly access

The promise of scholarly research depends in large part on researchers’ ability to access it. Across participating platforms, SeamlessAccess helps researchers reach scholarly content through federated identity. But it can only support that journey where institutions and their content providers have enabled support for federated access in keeping with current standards.

Recent data and discussions across the research and education communities have brought growing risks in legacy access models into sharper focus. Federated identity infrastructure is already available to many academic institutions, yet its availability has not translated into routine use for library e-resources. Researchers cannot benefit from access pathways that remain unused.

Today, SeamlessAccess is bringing these communities together in a new initiative: Advancing Federated Identity for Library E-Resources. Libraries, institutional identity and access management (IAM) teams, publishers, technology providers, federations, national research and education networks (NRENs), and standards organizations will develop requirements, investigate adoption barriers, and develop and test implementation recommendations.

The initiative’s approved charter is now available: [Read the charter].

Why now

The gap between discovery and access is widening. Researchers find content through search engines, APIs, AI assistants, and other applications that take them further from library-managed access pathways. This extends beyond the familiar challenge of beginning research off campus; recognizing institutional affiliation across that distance is essential to connecting researchers with research.

Institutional discovery experiences, including SeamlessAccess, provide a bridge: researchers identify their institution and use its sign-in to reach scholarly content. But these services rely on institutions and content providers enabling federated access. Even where federation is available, it often remains underused.

EBSCO’s platform analysis illustrates the gap between available infrastructure and actual access, with findings explored in Advancing Federated Identity in the Library Ecosystem in The Scholarly Kitchen. Across the academic library partners examined, fewer than a third of those with federation available use it for e-resource access.

The data also suggests that underutilisation of federated access – single sign-on (SSO) – matters to sustained usage. Successful IP-based access has declined by approximately one-third over three years. Meanwhile, across roughly 1,400 institutions that moved to federated SSO between April 2024 and April 2025, authenticated logins increased by a median of 23%.

This leads to a hypothesis that wider use of federated access could help recover research demand that existing access methods fail to serve. However, these directional observations do not quantify unmet demand or isolate the effect of authentication. Testing this hypothesis requires community-wide measurement to understand how much demand goes unmet and how much more dependable access could recover, alongside investigation into what prevents routine use of federation where it is already available.

Building on shared experience

Over the past year, SeamlessAccess, NISO, Internet2, and the Scholarly Networks Security Initiative (SNSI) brought scholarly communications and research and education identity communities together to refine the problem, test it against their experience, and shape a shared response.

Presented at GEANT’s 2026 TNC conference and accompanying eduGAIN/REFEDS Town Hall in Helsinki, the proposed initiative drew strong support from the international community for assessing the problem, measuring its impact, and developing practical solutions together.

The effort also builds on earlier work through RA21, SeamlessAccess, and FIM4L, Federated Identity Management for Libraries. FIM4L’s longstanding work on library requirements, privacy, and consistent implementation provides a strong foundation for this initiative, with the support of our FIM4L colleagues.

What each community brings

The initiative must establish both what federated identity must deliver for scholarly access and how institutions and providers can implement and sustain it consistently.

• Libraries and consortia bring requirements for the populations they serve, researcher privacy, reporting, subscription arrangements, and access support, alongside experience managing access.
• Institutional IAM teams bring policy and security requirements and expertise in identity, affiliation, entitlement, and attribute release. They will assess how scholarly access fits within institutional identity services.
• Publishers and service providers bring requirements for recognizing eligible users, applying institutional agreements, protecting content, and supporting customers. Their experience will identify where implementation differences create friction.
• Federations and NRENs bring trust infrastructure and convening power across all of the above. They will assess how existing capabilities meet requirements across their regional members, as well as across international contexts.

These contributions will help distinguish requirements already supported by federation from gaps in implementation, guidance, or coordination, giving the community a clear basis for deciding what to address.

Join the next stage

Success means researchers reach the content they are entitled to use across changing discovery and access pathways. We welcome the community’s participation in shaping this coalition and its work.

The approved charter sets out an approximately two-year effort, with opportunities to help steer the initiative and contribute to its phases:

• Steering Committee: We will soon be inviting self-nominations and nominations of candidates to help guide the initiative’s focus, activities, and resourcing. The committee is expected to meet monthly, beginning later in 2026. Members should bring relevant expertise and a strong understanding of their community, with experience in libraries, publishing or service provider platforms, research and education federations, or standards committees. Those representing an institutional identity provider perspective should have experience managing library access or institutional IAM.
• Discovery: Library and consortial staff, campus IAM teams, and publishers will share requirements, implementation experience, and aggregate data. The goal is to identify gaps between requirements and existing capabilities to inform Design.
• Design: Operational, technical, policy, and standards practitioners will develop recommendations and pilot tests. The goal is agreement on practical implementation approaches and measures for evaluating them.
• Pilots: Institutions, consortia, and provider platforms will test those approaches in real deployments. The goal is to assess outcomes, implementation effort, and ongoing support, then refine recommendations for broader adoption.

We will continue the conversation through the Internet2 Technology Exchange and Charleston Conference. As the initiative gets underway, we will establish channels for communication and community updates.

Read the charter and sign up to receive updates or express interest in participating using this form.

No single sector oversees the full path from discovery to access. Keeping critical scholarly content within researchers’ reach requires libraries, publishers, campus IAM teams, and federations to bring open minds, shared ambition, and coordinated action to this work.