We applaud your efforts to create a Recommended Practice for Single Sign-On authentication for access to scholarly and other information resources. The recommendation complements activities and strategies at the UC Libraries* and elsewhere. We agree that identifying the components of consistent practice among the stakeholders – Identity Providers, Service Providers, and those who broker between the two and promote the resulting end user enhancements, i.e. libraries, is essential. We believe that the Recommended Practice could go even further and declare Shibboleth the preferred SAML-based technology/protocol suite, and participation in InCommon the preferred path to the federation of trust required to move toward ubiquitous Shibboleth-based authentication (in North America).
To move through the transition described in the document, the recommended practice needs to be accompanied by commitments to adopt the practice and work toward the vision. To that end we hope that NISO will initiate or facilitate a call for such commitments from a) InCommon itself and specifically the continued refinement of its own (library) Best Practices referenced in the document; b) publisher groups (e.g. STM, AAUP, etc); c) library groups (e.g. ALA, ARL, DLF, etc); and d) higher ed. technology groups (e.g. Educause).
*represented, for example, in “ UC Libraries Shibboleth Task Force: Improving Online Access Management through Shibboleth” (September 2010; http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/sopag/ShibbolethTF/Shibboleth_taskforce_report_10Sept2010.pdf) |
