OpenAthens

The Health Sciences Library at Upstate Medical University uses a service called OpenAthens to manage user access to library managed electronic resources, including journals, eBooks & databases. 

What is OpenAthens?

OpenAthens is an access management platform that allows us to link our library resources to your Upstate account.  Developed in the 1990s at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom, it is an open-source solution that allows the Library to provide better access to our resources for both on-campus and off-campus users.

Benefits of OpenAthens

In addition to providing the usage information that supports decisions about electronic resources renewals and cancellations, OpenAthens offers other benefits, including:

• Greater flexibility for licensing resources for targeted groups.
• Better account security - OpenAthens authenticates using a more secure method (SAML) than is used by the previous system (EZProxy).
• Fewer logins - once you login to OpenAthens on your browser of choice, you will no longer have to login for the duration of your session. 

Authenticating creates a single sign-on session that will persist across most resources without reentering log in credentials. As more publishers and platforms move to supporting single sign-on, moving between resources will become even more seamless.

Logging in with OpenAthens

Your authentication credentials are the same as your Upstate issued account (the same used for email, Epic, Self-Serve, etc.).  If you are an Upstate affiliate or are allowed access to resources through our Volunteer or Emeritus , please refer to the Requesting Access section of this guide. 

Your login session will continue as long as you are actively utilizing the resources. It will deactivate after not using OpenAthens for an average period of about an hour, or until you log out of/restart the computer/device used.