Events

With travel and conferences resuming, here are some opportunities to meet us in person:

• Council of Science Editors meeting, May 1-3 in Phoenix, AZ
• Society for Scholarly Publishing, June 1-3 in Chicago.

Drop a line if you’re planning to attend these events. We would be delighted to meet up!

ALA committee on Federated Authentication

Core, a division of the American Library Association, has created a new Federated Authentication Committee that will focus the library community’s efforts in understanding, evaluating, and implementing federated authentication as an access mechanism for library resources. Part of the responsibilities of this committee will be to assign a member to be a liaison to the SeamlessAccess governance committee and be a voice for the library community in the broader federated authentication conversation.

We at SeamlessAccess are very excited about having additional library voices as a part of our work.

SeamlessAccess 1.6.2 in Beta

Back in the fall of last year, we called on your help for translations to make SeamlessAccess available in multiple languages – something that we feel is very important given our focus on usability and the diverse, international user base that we serve. Translations are still very welcome if you’d like to contribute to the project in this way (for instructions on how to do that, see our October newsletter).

We’re delighted to announce now that SeamlessAccess 1.6.2, including internationalization, is available in Beta. We kindly ask you to test the release at https://use.thiss.io/, and let us know if you encounter any problems or issues via GitHub.

For more detail, please see the release notes.

Wolters Kluwer and Mark Allen Group implement SeamlessAccess

We’re thrilled to announce that two more publishers have integrated with SeamlessAccess this month.

Wolters Kluwer have integrated SeamlessAccess on their OVID platform, giving a prominent place to the SeamlessAccess button in the top-right of the article landing page. “Wolters Kluwer is excited to now provide our customers with the opportunity for a simplified login experience through SeamlessAccess. Starting on March 1 we’ve made authentication and access easier for our Ovid journals experience users as a pilot for the WK organization. We look forward to implementing SeamlessAccess within other products in the future.”, says Nicole Caputo, Senior Product Manager, Ovid.

Mark Allen group, a family-owned, independent media communication company, have completed an advanced integration with the support of their platform host Atypon. “Mark Allen is delighted to have integrated SeamlessAccess into our MAG Online Library site. Ease of access is vital for our diverse audiences, so enabling SeamlessAccess on the site promises to be a significant step forward.”, says Tom Pollard, Product Director, Digital Resources at Mark Allen Group.

We are delighted to have these organizations on board and expect other publishers to join soon!

For a list of (known) SeamlessAccess integrators, please see https://seamlessaccess.org/stakeholders/for-service-providers/.

Welcome Inge Schoutsen

At the end of January we announced that SeamlessAccess was looking for a lead UX designer. We’re very happy to let you know in this newsletter that we have found that person! Inge Schoutsen has joined the team to carry on this important work for SeamlessAccess. She will be focusing on providing design guidance and help SeamlessAccess deliver a streamlined access experience for researchers around the globe as well as plan and help execute ongoing validation of existing and evolving design recommendations. She will also work closely with the development team and our stakeholders from multiple organizations.

Inge is an allround UX/Product Designer & Strategist with 20+ years of experience working at digital design agencies, tech companies and scholarly publishers. Next to her design practice, she is an artist represented by Josilda da Conceição gallery in Amsterdam, where she is based.

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.