Product manager, Matt Keen, explains how IOP Publishing simplified user access on IOPscience and improved user experience.

1. How IOP Publishing simplified user access to
IOPscience With OpenAthens & SeamlessAccess
Matthew Keen
Product Owner – Access & Entitlement
30th June 2021

2. Supporting Federated Authentication on IOPscience
• Supported federated
authentication for over 15
years on IOPscience.
• Originally supported 7
Federations up to 2014.
• Participated in eduGAIN to
to connect with universities
and institutions across the
globe.

3. Low Use Of Federated Authentication on IOPscience
• Usage via federated authentication
remained low despite increasing
adoption of this access method.
• Low usage despite increasing
library appetite to support
federated authentication was the
primary catalyst for change.
• Recognised that the current user
experience serving federated
authentication needed
improvement to make it a more
attractive pathway for researchers
to our content.

4. Investing in Federated Authentication – Adoption of
OpenAthens WayFinder Service on IOPscience
• Flexible and smart search
by institution name,
abbreviation or email.
• Typeahead matching.
• Geolocation technology.

5. Federated Authentication User Experience on
IOPscience – Pre SeamlessAccess
• Turnaway panel on IOPscience
paywall view.
• Additional step/click.
• No consistency in language
used.

6. Building Blocks of SeamlessAccess on IOPscience
1
Consistent visual cue
and call to action on our
paywall view signals
institutional access.
2 The user’s institution is
persisted in browser local
storage and subsequently
rendered in the
SeamlessAccess button
across all participating
publishers.

7. Building Blocks of SeamlessAccess
3
Remove unnecessary
pages / steps in the
user access
experience.
4
Normalization of
Language

8. Logins Via Federated Access Pre/Post SeamlessAccess

9. SeamlessAccess – Usage Impact on IOPscience
• Comparing usage between two periods of time – 1st January to 14th March 2021
against 15th March to 2nd May 2021
• Numbers based on COUNTER aligned ‘Total Item Requests’ metric.

10. Thank You!!
matthew.keen@ioppublishing.org