News

Extending the benefits of SeamlessAccess to a new audience SeamlessAccess hit an important milestone recently with the addition of our most recent service provider, The HistoryMakers. While over the last years we’ve seen growing traction with global publishers of science, technical and medical content, the benefits of more seamless access are just as relevant and important to the broader community. The HistoryMakers is 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.

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!

Upcoming (and Past) Events On October 14, Heather Flanagan will be speaking about SeamlessAccess and related topics at “Cyber Security in Higher Education”, sponsored by SNSI. Register here On 24 September, Heather Staines spoke about SeamlessAccess in the webinar “Identity in Research Infrastructure: An overview of how identity is managed in scholarly infrastructure” during Peer Review Week 2021. A recording of the session is available here. Emerald integrates with SeamlessAccess Emerald Publishing has implemented SeamlessAccess on the Emerald Insight platform, making it easier for researchers to seamlessly access research from any place and any device.

Upcoming Events On 24 September, Heather Staines will be talking about SeamlessAccess in a webinar entitled “Identity in Research Infrastructure: An overview of how identity is managed in scholarly infrastructure” as part of Peer Review Week 2021. You are cordially invited, please register here. SeamlessAccess and the User Journey SeamlessAccess is all about providing a seamless, intuitive user experience, with the ideal being that it “just works” with as little user interaction as possible.

Upcoming Events On 15 July 2021, the STM Association will be hosting a free webinar on “Web browsers, privacy, and your publishing platform webinar.” In this session, we’ll discuss the changes browser vendors are making to prevent ad networks from tracking users without notice. SeamlessAccess and Browser Changes Above, we mentioned the webinar scheduled for 15 July 2021. The changes on the browser roadmap are particularly important to organizations that support controlled access to online resources.

Web browsers, privacy, and federated identity Dr. Jane Smith is a postdoc at a major research institution. Overnight, she upgraded her Apple Macbook to the latest version of Apple’s MacOS. While in her lab she powers up her Macbook and connects to the campus WiFi network. She reads an email from a colleague containing a link to a recently published journal article. She clicks the link, which launches the Safari browser on her Macbook, but receives a message from the publisher’s website saying she doesn’t have access to the article.

Entity Category Use Case Scenarios The SeamlessAccess project has a number of initiatives that are designed to improve the wider world of federated authentication beyond just the SeamlessAccess service. Recognizing that existing solutions weren’t suitable for many of the use cases that libraries and publishers have in today’s information landscape, SeamlessAccess has led a number of efforts to improve the flow of authentication and authorization. The first of these was the Entity Category working group.

Upcoming Events If you’re interested in a different perspective on federation, education, and research, GÉANT’s TNC21 conference, June 21-25, is always a great source of information. It is also free and entirely virtual this year. More information is available at https://tnc21.geant.org/. ALA Annual runs from June 23-29, and always has excellent content for the library community. This year, Jason Griffey (NISO) and John Felts (Coastal Carolina University) are presenting a case study on SeamlessAccess to show how one library has approached the use of federated identity as part of their services.

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.

Identity Provider Filtering in SeamlessAccess Thoughts on architecture By Leif Johansson, Head of Infrastructure Services for SUNET and architect for SeamlessAccess Today SeamlessAccess presents a single view of all the identity providers it knows about - a single set of IdPs is available for searches to whatever SP is calling the discovery service. This presents a problem because of the reciprocity problem inherent in how identity federations based on SAML federations work.