When users have accounts from more than one organisation
OpenAthens keeps users signed in for up to 8 hours to give them the best possible single-sign-on experience.
Some users will belong to more than one organisation that uses OpenAthens and they might have more than one OpenAthens account. The organisations are unlikely to have the exact same subscriptions so these users will need to switch between their accounts from time to time.
The easiest way to use more than one account is to use a different browser for each but this may not always be possible. What the user needs to do then can vary depending on what type of accounts they have. The three basic steps are:
Know that they need to change accounts
It’s usually best to do the next steps in a new tab so you don’t lose your place.
Sign out with the active account
User’s should bookmark either the signout link or MyAthens:
The first will sign them out. The second is an extra click, but will confirm what they’re signed in with if they’re not sure, and have an option to sign them out; it also only requires one bookmark (see next).
Sign in with the other account
Depending on what they were doing in the original tab, they may be able to return to their original journey after signing out and continuing from there - e.g. if they were about to follow a wayfless or redirector link from another library’s page, they’d be directed to the other account’s sign in page. This might not work for all resources or access routes though.
Signing in again via MyAthens will always work because it has a panel on it which will remember multiple organisations as well as a way to directly access a generic OpenAthens username and password box.
We recommend using the panel to find your organisation, especially if either organisation has given you a local account (one that does other things on their system such as logging in to email or computers).
Advanced users
For users that have to do this a lot, they might like the three shortcuts method. Here they would have bookmarks for the wayfless links to MyAthens for both organisations as well as a signout link.
The wayfless link to MyAthens will take the form:
https://my.openathens.net/auth?entityID=ORGANISATION_ENTITY_ID