SeamlessAccess is a service designed to help streamline the online access experience for researchers using scholarly collaboration tools, information resources, and shared research infrastructure. We’re back from a short hiatus in newsletter writing, and the last few months have seen quite a bit of work happening within SeamlessAccess and in the broader federated identity community! We’re excited to bring you up to date on the latest news.

Upcoming Events

On 16 March, OpenAthens is hosting a session at their Access Lab 2021 event that includes a case study on one library’s experience with SeamlessAccess, Shibboleth, and OpenAthens. Registration is now closed, but the content will be publicly available from 1 July 2021. More information is available on the Access Lab page: https://openathens.org/access-lab-2021/.

On April 27, the STM Association’s Society Day will include a session on SeamlessAccess and GetFTR. See more information on the meeting website: https://www.stm-assoc.org/events/stm-spring-conference-society-day-2021/.

If you are interested in learning more about federations around the world, REFEDS will be hosting a free webinar on 1 April that examines the results of the most recent REFEDS Annual Survey. It’s an excellent opportunity to see how different federations are structured, their priorities, and their challenges. Registration is available here: https://events.geant.org/event/581/.

NISO Plus Roundup

The SeamlessAccess session at NISO Plus was a fun and engaging session! Discussion, particularly in the Q&A after the event, was active, with librarians, federation operators, and publishers all involved in better understanding the technologies behind SeamlessAccess. If you missed the session, you can see the recording here: https://nisoplus2021.cadmore.media/Title/dcddde5b-cef9-45dd-a932-cd546c84760b.

New REFEDS Consultation – eduPerson Analytics ID The REFEDS Schema Editorial Board’s subcommittee, the eduPerson Analytics Code subcommittee, has proposed a new attribute to be added to the eduPerson schema – a common schema for identity metadata used globally by education and research organizations – that would provide a way for an institution to send through a set of reporting codes as part of the authentication transaction that a Service Provider could then use to create segmented usage reports. The primary use case captures the need of a publisher/library scenario where data is needed to understand the use of a given resource and be able to classify that resource into buckets (such as internal billing codes). This happens outside the authentication/authorization transaction and so is not itself an entitlement. If you would like to know more about this proposed attribute and the type of information that it would contain, please see the REFEDS Consultation page: https://wiki.refeds.org/display/CON/Consultation%3A+eduPersonAnalyticsID.

This consultation is open from: 4 March 2021 15:00 CET to 5 April 2021 17:00 CET.

SeamlessAccess.org is a service, 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 and identity providers and federation operators, vendors, publishers.