Sure happy to. For reference, it is probably useful for me to crosspost here a message I posted yesterday to the JISC lis-e-resources list:
As some of you have noted, we have recently made some updates to the institutional sign in user experience on ScienceDirect. These are part of a set of changes we are making in an effort to solve some long-standing difficulties users have accessing our products, and to ensure that the sign-in and access experience is consistent across all of Elsevier.
I want to take this chance to apologise for any confusion caused as we make these changes, and to reassure you that they do not represent a change in our policies: we have always offered users the ability to access subscribed content by signing in with their institution without having to register for an Elsevier account. Similarly, when users opt to create an Elsevier account and link it to their institutional credentials to access personalised features such as alerts, we have always asked for a minimal set of information comprising name and email address.
In our new approach, we are assuming that users who click the “Sign in” option want to access personalised features provided by an Elsevier account. We ask them for their email upfront so that we can check if they already have an account, and if so, allow them to link their institutional credentials to their existing account. This we hope will reduce a major source of user frustration when users create duplicate accounts inadvertently and then can’t access all of their personalised settings in once place.
Users who want to access content without creating an Elsevier account can click on the “Check Access” button which currently appears on non-subscribed article pages, which will lead them through a flow which allows them to authenticate via their institution and access the content directly and anonymously if that’s their preference.
Early feedback from users and customers has revealed that we need to make further improvements to make this distinction clearer. We are planning to make the following changes over the new few weeks: • Change the wording on the “sign in via institution” screen to explain why we’re asking users for their email • Give the users the option to skip the step of creating an Elsevier account if that’s not what they intended to do • Improve the visibility of the Check Access option in the ScienceDirect user interface.
We will continue to monitor and make further adjustments as needed, so we welcome any and all feedback on this new approach. Our goal is to make it as quick and convenient as possible for users to access resources by signing in via their institution. Crucially, this is not at the expense of their personal data: we are committed to making access easier while improving, not chipping away at, user privacy. We firmly believe that users should only have to sign in to an Elsevier account if there’s a reason, and a benefit to them.
Thanks
_________________________ Chris Shillum VP Identity and Platform Strategy ELSEVIER | Research Products
c.shillum@elsevier.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1108-3660
-----Original Message----- From: Jiri Pavlik jiri.pavlik@mzk.cz Sent: Thursday, 12 September, 2019 5:43 AM To: fim4l@lists.daasi.de Subject: Re: [Fim4l] Hello and brief intro
Dear Chris,
could you let us know, please, once currently planned changes in sign in at Science Direct are in place?
It is great to have you and Meshna at FIM4L so we can work together and make sure that ScienceDirect, Scopus and other other Elsevier services follow FIM4L recommendations in the best way possible.
All the best
Jiri
On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 2:05 PM Raoul Teeuwen raoul.teeuwen@surfnet.nl wrote:
Hi Chris.
Welcome, great you’re on board ...
Not to ‘welcome’ you with a potential unpleasant discussion, and i do not know what you heard about the discussion after people saw what buttons Elsevier has put online at ScienceDirect, but: do you see any possibiity to either roll back the changes in access/sign in-buttons to a previous version (and maybe 1st have a discussion with people in the identity and access management field, or fix the current situation? Or is this a case of Elsevier balancing all aspects, of which ‘strategies to make money’ of course is one, which leads to, accorinding to many in our field, the strange current UI/UX? Redefining ‘access’ and ‘sign in’, and argumenting that it’s just a matter of users getting used to that, sounds a bit ... ‘unreal’...
With kindest regards, met vriendelijke groet,
Raoul
tel:+31641195989
On 06/09/2019, 21:15, "FIM4L on behalf of Shillum, Chris (ELS-NYC)" <fim4l-bounces@lists.daasi.de on behalf of c.shillum@elsevier.com> wrote:
Hi All
My name’s Chris Shillum. I’m VP of Identity Management and Platform Strategy at Elsevier, looking after Elsevier’s access management system among other things. I’m also a member of the SeamlessAccess.org governance group and we co-chair of the RA21 project.
I’ve been involved in federated authentication for many years and looking forward for joining the discussions of this group
Happy for my name and affiliation to be published on the website.
Cheers
Chris
Chris Shillum
VP Identity and Platform Strategy
ELSEVIER | Research Products
+1 212 462 1987 office
+1 646 250 8029 mobile
c.shillum@elsevier.com
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1108-3660
FIM4L mailing list FIM4L@lists.daasi.de http://lists.daasi.de/listinfo/fim4l