What is Athens?
Athens is the name of the service used to authenticate and authorise users for access to online services from around the world. There are now two major national Athens services in operation; one for UK education community and another for NHS sector. Using Athens can provide your users with access to a large number of different databases with a single username and password. It also allows your users to access your organization’s online subscriptions even when they are outside the institution’s normal IP range. This means that they get remote access to your library’s journals when they are not on site. For more information on Athens authentication please contact EduServ.
Athens is a national authentication system used in the UK. It controlled access to a large number of electronic resources and verified a users eligibility to access these resources. Athens was run by EduServ and funded by JISC. JISC stopped funding Athens in 2008 and moved over to funding and supporting Shibboleth/UK Federation. In line with this the UK Higher Education community are also beginning to move away from Athens and over to Shibboleth/UK Federation. As of 31st July 2008 the University of Edinburgh ended it’s contract with EduServ so users can no longer log into online resources via Athens. Please see the Athens news page regarding this change.
