An open discussion list for topics related to the eduGAIN interfederation service.

[Peter Schober <peter.schober AT univie.ac.at>]

How are we dealing with publishers, as a community?

I'm currently in the process of talking to e.g. BioOne (which is using
Atypon's Literatum platform, forever stuck on SAML1, seemingly) and
Palgrave Macmillan (using the OpenAthens SAML SP), both of which are
present in eduGAIN thanks to the UK federation.

That may mean very little, though, as their discovery interfaces may
not be equipped to decouple location/country from federation feed or
provide for working discovery sidestepping the category.
Which of course is one (more) reason to get rid of multi-step IDP
discovery interfaces. Those just have too many issues with
interfederation, e.g. first pick country -- United Kingdom -- then
pick your institution -- say, Salzburg University (which is not in the
UK).  Or the UK entry only lists UK institutions no entities via
interfederation and those entities don't come in via a sperate
metadata feed to drive discovery, etc.
(No idea how much of those interfaces is automated and how much is
manual work. I do see slightly differing display names for
institutions here and there, so at least some manual overrides seem to
be in place.)

So I'm thinking at least for publishers using common platforms we
should use some common, unified approach to educate them of our plans.
(At least my plan is to stop reduntandly registering entities that are
available in eduGAIN, when the publisher has many/all of our IDPs
available, again, via eduGAIN.)

Atypon and OpenAthens seem to be the most widely used platforms and
targetting the platform providers (possibly via the publishers) to fix
their setups (metadata, discovery) to better integrate with only
eduGAIN seems like a more efficient way to see those changes?

Does anyone else see the need/opportunity to educate those publishers
(or platform providers) on the merits of eduGAIN -- "One federation to
keyrollover them all"?
Or do we all keep sending inconsistent, sometimes contradictory,
messages to the publishers wrt integration and metadata?
Or do I leave all that to the UKfederation, which may or may not have
such plans for the many many publishers they're exposing to eduGAIN?
(So at least those publishers didn't opt out of eduGAIN, that's
something, I guess.)

Best regards,
-peter