OpenAthens is an identity and access management service, supplied by Jisc, a British not-for-profit information technology services company.
Identity provider (IdP) organisations can keep usernames in the cloud, locally or both.
[1] OpenAthens for Publishers[2] software for service providers supports multiple platforms and federations.
Technically, the service provides deep packet inspection proxying (in a similar manner to EZproxy) and SAML-based federation,[3] as well as various on-boarding services for institutions, consortia and vendors.
Spun off from Bath University through the vehicle of charitable status, Eduserv was established as a not-for-profit organisation in 1999.