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 is the monthly update for January 2020, where we catch up on the latest activities within SeamlessAccess.org.

Upcoming Conference Sessions

ALA Midwinter (January 24-28, 2020) Jason Griffey (Director of Strategic Initiatives, NISO) will share the lessons being learned to date from the beta testing of SeamlessAccess, the best practices and policies developed by the existing working groups, and describe what libraries and librarians need to know in order to deliver a simpler, privacy-preserving access experience for users.

NISO Plus (February 23-25, 2020)

Tim Lloyd (CEO, LibLynx) will offer an introduction to SeamlessAccess for those new to the service, and Ralph Youngen (Director, Publishing Systems Integration, American Chemical Society) and Lisa Hinchliffe (Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) will kick off a more in-depth conversation about SeamlessAccess and its implications in the research and library communities.

Community Engagement

The Entity Category and Attribute Bundle working group, a group of librarians, service providers, and federation operators, is working to define appropriate mechanisms around attribute release. Attributes are the information that an identity provider such as a library or research laboratory may share with a service provider, and can include signaling when no attributes at all should be released, when specific attributes should be optional, or when specific attributes are required. The group is currently working through various use cases to determine what makes sense and where the commonalities are when it comes to what attributes are required, and when. After this working group produces its recommendations, a new group that focuses on how to incorporate those recommendations into contracts will kick off.

Terms of Service

The official “Terms of Service” that sets the policies around the use of the SeamlessAccess service is still in progress. We are currently working with legal counsel on that, and the final copy will also be made public once complete.