January 11 Open Teleconference: Seamless Access

Seamless Access, a service governed as a coalition between four organizations: NISO, GÉANT, Internet2, and the International Association of STM Publishers, is designed to help foster a more streamlined online access experience when using scholarly collaboration tools, information resources, and shared research infrastructure. The service promotes digital authentication leveraging an existing single-sign-on infrastructure through one’s home institution, while maintaining an environment that protects personal data and privacy. Participants include researchers, service providers, libraries and identity providers and federation operators, vendors, and publishers.

The direction and implementation for the service came from the RA21 Initiative, a joint project of the International Association of STM Publishers and the National Information Standards Organization. While the origin of the effort was in the scholarly publishing and library communities, the applicability of SeamlessAccess is for all parties that want to use federated identity as part of their authentication and authorization workflows.  Seamless Access Guiding Principles include a focus on the user experience for researchers and the need for a streamlined experience regardless of the researcher's starting point, physical location, or preferred device. SeamlessAccess takes into account privacy regulations in its work to balance security and usability, and works to supply solutions and  plans that avoid additional burdens in implementation and maintenance. 

Todd Carpenter, NISO's Executive Director, and Jason Griffey, NISO's Director of Strategy, will discuss the latest updates and efforts by the Seamless Access working groups to supply SAML-based federated authentication as an alternative to IP with the aim of providing a robust, scalable solution to providing remote access to scholarly resources.