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Institutional Authentication Options

  • Updated

Background

Lean Library Workspace is a suite of reference management tools that allow your users to collect references, collaborate on projects with other users, cite references in documents and format citations/bibliographies in various citation styles, along with additional reference management features. This article outlines some important considerations about the choice of authentication, and how it might affect your users ability to continue to use Lean Library Workspace if/when a  subscription comes to an end.

Key concepts

Shared projects

Users can create shared projects containing references (including full text resources where available), and shared annotations made on the full text article resources. This allows a group of students, researchers etc to have a common library of references, highlight relevant or interesting parts of those references to their collaborators, and cite them in Word or Google Docs documents.

User licences

  • Users can have access to a freemium or premium version of Lean Library Workspace independently of the institutional subscription.
  • Users are assigned a licence to allow them to access the premium features, such as increased limits on project creation/sharing, and algorithm generated article suggestions.
  • The licence can either be paid for by the Institution or the individual. Licence allocation is managed as part of the authentication of the user to the institution.

Access to shared projects

Long term access to shared projects can be affected by the choice of authentication method. The rest of this article outlines the options, and how they relate to user management and shared projects.

Choosing an authentication method

The institution will need to decide which of the licence allocation models best suit their needs and the needs of their users. 

Authentication methods

Individual user accounts

  • A user can create a Lean Library Workspace account and use the freemium features in Workspace without having to request permission from the institution.
  • The account is authenticated using a username and password, or using an individual's Google or Facebook accounts. The profile is created by the user when they sign up independently of any institutional systems.

IP Access

  • The institution will provide us a list of IP addresses that are considered to be 'on campus' for the purposes of identifying a user logging in from that location (including IPs for proxy servers/VPNs used for remote access). This is similar to a list of IP addresses that you may give to a publisher to allow access to full text services via a proxy.
  • Users will create 'individual' Lean Library Workspace accounts where they choose the email address and password to use to identify themselves. This could be a personal email address.
  • This could also be an existing user account where the user has studied or worked at a previous institution.
  • When the user logs in from within a verified IP range, they will be detected as logging in under your institutional account, and the premium features will be activated.
  • The user has to login from the campus network (directly from campus, or remotely via proxy/VPN) at least once every 120 days, or their access to premium features will expire.
  • If a user leaves the institution, their access to premium features will expire when they have not logged in from the campus after 120 days. They will retain access to private and shared projects and their resources. They will retain 'ownership' of shared projects.
  • Your IP address ranges should be for the external IP addresses seen by us as a result of Network Address Translation (NAT), and not IP addresses in ranges reserved for internal network use.

Setup IP Access

To setup IP Access, please raise a support ticket with a list of the IP address ranges that should be considered on campus.

Single Sign-On

Your users will authenticate using your Single Sign-On service. Lean Library Workspace will ask your SSO "Should we let this user in?" and your SSO will decide.

  • A user's profile will be identified using the email address associated with the Single Sign-On account they used to login to Workspace, and a licence will be assigned to give users access to the premium features.
  • If a user leaves the institution, they will no longer have an SSO account, and so will no longer have access to their Workspace account nor the premium features. They will lose access to their resources and to shared projects.
  • The user is free to create their own individual accounts, and the user could be re-invited to shared projects that they previously had access to if the user is still collaborating under the auspices of a different institution.  However, they would not be able to regain the 'ownership' of a shared project, nor would they be able to access resources previously collected in the SSO account.
  • Users would need to take action before they leave to create an individual user account, and then share their current SSO account's projects and references with the new account.

Setup SSO Authentication

Please see the Setting Up SSO for Lean Library Workspace article that takes you through the steps for setting up SSO.

Supported SSO services

We support the following Single Sign-On services:

  • Any authentication software that supports the SAML protocol, including, but not limited to Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft ADFS, Ping Federate, Shibboleth.
  • OpenAthens: We can support this through a direct OpenAthens connection.

 

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