EBSCO and the OpenAthens redirector

This guide will help you configure EBSCO products or resources to work with the OpenAthens redirector.

You will need to look up the redirector URL prefix in your OpenAthens Compass dashboard and then configure a proxy in the EBSCO interface.

The following steps work for all EBSCO products, including:

EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS)
EBSCOhost
EBSCO Researcher platform
EBSCO Full Text Finder

Information about EBSCO was correct at the time of writing. The OpenAthens support team will help where possible but cannot fully support third-party systems.

Prerequisites

Admin access to OpenAthens
Admin access to EBSCOadmin

Method

Get the redirector URL prefix

Log in to the OpenAthens Compass administrator dashboard (https://admin.openathens.net).
Go to Resources > Redirector link generator.

Screenshot of a pop-up window titled 'Redirector link generator'. At the top of the window, advisory text reads 'Redirector URLs can be created by adding (example URL) as a prefix to the target URL, or using the tool below'.

Copy the URL prefix shown. In this example, the prefix is https://go.openathens.net/redirector/yourdomain.com?url=.

Link to titles (resources) from an EBSCO product

Once you have the URL prefix, add it to your EBSCO product as a proxy server. (Although the redirector is not a proxy, we can use EBSCO’s proxy access function to insert the redirector prefix for compatible resources.)

Log in to EBSCOadmin (http://eadmin.ebscohost.com).
From the Choose profile drop-down, select the required product (for example, “EBSCO Discovery Service”).
Go to Customize services > Linking > Setup / Maintain proxies.
Click Add new proxy definition.
Enter the following information in the Proxy ID, Proxy Name and Proxy URL Mask fields:

Field	Input	Example
Proxy ID	An ID for the proxy definition	CODE `OARedirector`
Proxy Name	A friendly name for the proxy definition	CODE `OpenAthens Redirector`
Proxy URL Mask	Your redirector URL prefix, followed by {UrlEncode({targetURL})}	CODE `https://go.openathens.net/redirector/yourdomain.com?url={UrlEncode({targetURL})}`

Leave other fields as they are. (The other fields are not relevant since the redirector is not an actual proxy server.)
Submit.
Configure links to the required titles or resources so that they use this proxy definition. See the EBSCO guide to selecting a root proxy setting.

For more detail, see the EBSCO documentation:

Link to titles aggregated by EBSCO

See the EBSCO guide updating EBSCO URLs to use OpenAthens authentication.

Further support

Contact EBSCO support at https://connect.ebsco.com/s/contactsupport.