A turnaway is a request to access a resource that fails after the user has been successfully authenticated by their institution.
Turnaways come in two main types:
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The user tries to access a resource to which their institution doesn’t subscribe, so the service provider blocks them
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The user doesn’t have the right permissions to access the resource, so OpenAthens will block them if you use restrictive mode
OpenAthens' standard statistics reports don’t specifically track turnaways. That’s because our statistics log transfers; they don’t monitor what happens after a transfer. We cannot track the first type of turnaway because there is no mechanism to determine if the service provider grants the user access. The second type is logged internally if you use restrictive mode, but is not displayed in the built-in reports.
Nevertheless, there are ways to get information about turnaways. For some data, you will need to enable restrictive mode and to create your own statistics reports using our API. The reporting API offers raw statistics data including turnaways.
Requests that fail through lack of a subscription (not in restrictive mode)
Turnaways that occur because a user’s institution doesn’t subscribe to a resource are the simplest to track. Although they aren’t logged directly, you can infer their existence from information in your built-in statistics reports.
Unless you use restrictive mode, OpenAthens' statistics show transfers to all resources, whether you subscribe to the resource or not. If you isolate the data for resources to which you don’t subscribe, you can calculate how many requests failed because a user tried to access an unsupported resource.
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View the Resources > Usage report.
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Look at all the resources to which users were transferred.
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Compare this list with the list of resources to which you subscribe. How many transfers were made to resources not in your subscriptions?
If you use restrictive mode, this method won’t work because a transfer cannot take place if the resource has not been allocated to users.
Other turnaways (restrictive mode only)
By using our reporting API, you can get information about requests that fail under restrictive mode.
In restrictive mode, OpenAthens enforces access to resources based on users' permission sets, rather than leaving it up to the service provider to allow or deny access. This has the following effects:
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If a request fails because the user’s permissions don’t match permissions allocated to the resource, OpenAthens has a record of the turnaway which you can access through the API
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Transfers to resources to which you don’t subscribe no longer appear in the standard statistics (since no permissions are associated with those resources)
Fetching the data
Turnaway data obtained in restrictive mode is not available through the built-in statistics reports. To view this data, you must use the reporting API to fetch the required data and build a custom report.
Example report
The following screenshot shows a report of failed access requests generated through the reporting API. Some columns have been hidden to highlight the most relevant.
