Final Report & Recommendations: RA21 Hospital Clinical Access Working Group

27 June 2019 – The Hospital/Clinical Access Working Group, co-chaired by Michelle Brewer (Librarian/Market Intelligence Manager, Wolters Kluwer), Don Hamparian (Senior Product Manager, OCLC), and Catherine Dixon (Product Manager, Wolters Kluwer), came together to understand and offer insight into the unique requirements around content access when in a hospital or medical clinic setting. The results […]

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July 3, 2019

Beta-phase Recruitment – UX Designer

Coalition for Seamless Access UX/UI Designer – at 0.5 FTE for the first six months (July – Dec 2019). The Coalition for Seamless Access seeks an experienced UX Designer to design and usability test improvements to services that support the research community.  The Coalition will commence a beta phase starting in July of 2019 for […]

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May 23, 2019

Beta-phase Recruitment – Outreach Manager

Coalition for Seamless Access Outreach Manager (Service Providers) – at 0.4 FTE for the first six months (July – Dec 2019). The Coalition for Seamless Access has arisen from the RA21 project, the goal of which was to improve access to online scholarly resources by reducing barriers to access and authentication. The recommendations arising from […]

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May 6, 2019

RA21 Adopts GEANT Data Protection Code of Conduct

Recognising the importance of privacy and user control to stakeholders in scholarly communications, RA21 is happy to announce the adoption and endorsement of the GEANT Data Protection Code of Conduct. The GEANT Data Protection Code of Conduct provides specific guidance to service providers about how they should handle personal data in the context of federated authentication. Key points include: […]

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February 28, 2019

RA21: Technologies Tested and Solution Selected

Why RA21? The world of seamless access to scholarly content has a problem: current methods of access fail the tests of scalability, support for user privacy, and interoperability. In our recent statement regarding the growth of access brokers in the library and publishing markets, RA21 explains that by using open standards and building upon years […]

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August 27, 2018

The Future of Digital Identity and RA21

Federated identity services have been around for close to twenty years. The research and academic space served as a development and proving ground for standards like SAML and technologies like Shibboleth and CAS, and the commercial space ran with those ideas with standards like OAuth and OpenID Connect (OIDC). The success of companies like Google, […]

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February 12, 2018

2017 wrap up

As one year ends and another begins, it’s useful to take a moment to consider what has been accomplished to date with RA21, and what we expect in the coming year. RA21 formally started in mid-2016, as several STM members started to consider the growing number of issues with IP authorization and the limitations of […]

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December 21, 2017

RA21 Workshop – September 1, 2017

On 1 September, SURF hosted an RA21 general session and pilot workshop at their offices in Utrecht, NL. Approximately 25 people attended in person, with another 12 attending remotely. When compared to the event in London, this event had a more even distribution of librarians, vendors, publishers, and federation operators attending. The day opened with […]

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September 4, 2017

RA21 Workshop – July 7, 2017

Earlier this month, RA21 held a series of events at the lovely JISC office in London. The day started with an introduction to RA21; this session saw nearly 50 people in the room, along with another 50 people viewing the event online. The introduction included a summary of the problems around identity discovery that RA21 […]

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July 25, 2017

Federated Identity and Privacy

Over the next few blog posts, we’ll be diving into some of the issues brought up in the RA21 FAQ. This week, let’s talk about the use of federated identity and privacy. Almost everyone online has been to a site that requires the user to register, and offers the possibility of using one of their […]

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May 25, 2017