OpenAthens is an
identity and access management service, supplied by
Jisc, a British
not-for-profit
A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...
information technology services company.
Identity provider (IdP) organisations can keep
usernames in the cloud, locally or both. Integration with
ADFS,
LDAP or
SAML is supported.
''OpenAthens for Publishers (SP)'' software for
service providers supports multiple platforms and
federations
A federation (also known as a federal state) is a political entity characterized by a union of partially self-governing provinces, states, or other regions under a central federal government (federalism). In a federation, the self-governi ...
.
Technically the service provides
deep packet inspection proxying (in a similar manner to
EZproxy) and
SAML-based federation, as well as various on-boarding services for institutions, consortia and vendors.
History
With its origins in a
University of Bath initiative to reduce IT procurement costs for itself and other universities, the Athens project was conceived in 1996. Spun off from Bath University through the vehicle of charitable status, Eduserv was established as a not-for-profit organisation in 1999.
The service was originally named ''Athena'' after the Greek goddess of knowledge and learning; it is rumoured that the name change was partially caused by a common typo, but it was actually due to the name Athena being already trademarked (EU000204735). It launched as 'Athens' in 1997 (UK00002153200). After JISC decided to support
Shibboleth rather than Athens in 2008, Eduserv launched a federated version of Athens as 'OpenAthens' (EU013713821).
See also
*
Federated identity
*
SAML 2.0
*
SAML-based products and services
*
Shibboleth (Shibboleth Consortium)
References
{{Reflist
External links
OpenAthens
Federated identity
Identity management systems
Information technology in the United Kingdom
Science and technology in Somerset
University of Bath