January 10 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. Seamless Access 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. It's designed to help foster a more streamlined online access experience when using scholarly collaboration tools, information resources, and shared research infrastructure. Participants include researchers, service providers, libraries and identity providers and federation operators, vendors, and publishers.

The direction and implementation for the Seamless Access service came from the RA21 Initiative, a joint project of NISO and the International Association of STM Publishers. While the origin of the effort was in the scholarly publishing and library communities, the applicability of Seamless Access 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. Seamless Access 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. In addition, a key part of the mission of the Coalition is to improve understanding of the technologies that support the SeamlessAccess experience.

Todd Carpenter, NISO's Executive Director, and Jason Griffey, NISO's Director of Strategy, will discuss  how the Coalition for Seamless Access is supplying 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.  They will also cover the current roadmap including the efforts by the Seamless Access working groups to create outputs to help support practical implementation, and will talk about how supporters can stay in touch with Seamless Access work and contribute.