How can I build a WAYFless URL to Elsevier products?

Last updated on August 02, 2023

How can I build a WAYFless URL to Elsevier products?

Last updated on August 02, 2023

Your IdP is set up for access to Elsevier products as described here. You can provide authentication shortcuts for your users by giving them WAYFless URLs.

What is WAYF?

Where Are You From.

One of the purposes of federated access is that the identity is managed by an institution or organization. A user visiting a service that requires institutional subscription needs to tell us which institution do they come from, hence Where Are You From.

What is a WAYF discovery service?

This is an application that helps the user answer Where Are You From question. It can be presented in the form of institutional search or in the form of a menu. Both allow a visitor of a product to navigate to their institution, sign in with their institutional credentials and be redirected to the product, authenticated.

What is a WAYFless URL?

It is a mechanism that allows a user to skip the WAYF discovery. It is constructed following a syntax, it looks like a long link and it can be set up anywhere where a user may want to start a session.

When a user clicks on that link:

The user is directed to their IdP sign-in page right away.
The user confirms their identity to the IdP.
If authorized by the IdP, the user is redirected to a resource they wanted to visit, authenticated.

If your IdP remembers the user from a previous session, steps 1 and 2 will be invisible to them.

What is your WAYFless URL syntax?

The WAYFless URL syntax to Elsevier resources that support federated authentication is the same:

https://auth.elsevier.com/ShibAuth/institutionLogin?entityID=[url-encoded-entityID]&appReturnURL=[url-encoded-target]

Elsevier SP: https://auth.elsevier.com/ShibAuth/institutionLogin?
This is a location that initiates the session request; it is the same for all WAYFless URLs to all Elsevier resources.
entityID example: https://idp.eduserv.org.uk/openathens
This has to be your institutional entityID; it must be URL encoded.
appReturnURL example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/
This has to be a resource to which you want to send a user to; it must be URL encoded

Both entityID and appReturnURL parameters must be URL encoded. When these parameters are not encoded, access will fail.

The appReturnURL will mostly be a homepage of the product you want to send a user to, but it is possible to link to canonical or bookmarkable URLs within some products where that makes sense.

Do you have any WAYFless URL examples?

Yes, we do! The entityID used in the examples below is a generic OpenAthens entityID. To generate WAYFless URLs for your users, replace the entityID value in the examples with your own, URL encoded, entityID.

ClinicalKey

Embase

Engineering Village

Funding Institutional

ScienceDirect Homepage

https://auth.elsevier.com/ShibAuth/institutionLogin?entityID=https%3A%2F%2Fidp.eduserv.org.uk%2Fopenathens&appReturnURL=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com

ScienceDirect article, based on PII

https://auth.elsevier.com/ShibAuth/institutionLogin?entityID=https%3A%2F%2Fidp.eduserv.org.uk%2Fopenathens&appReturnURL=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%2Fscience%2Farticle%2Fpii%2FS0196885815000378

ScienceDirect journal, based on journal title

A note about ScienceDirect and third parties (such as discovery services and link resolvers). It is possible to generate links to SD articles in many ways. Not all ways will work as a WAYFless URL. A third party service can use any kind of metadata, parameters and functions to generate links - and that's okay. For any of these links to initiate the Shibboleth session, however, the rules are the same - if the final redirect from a 3rd party application generates the correct WAYFless URL, we expect it to work. If the WAYFless URL syntax doesn't look like the one above, then we don't expect it to work.

A note about DOI links. When a WAYFless URL contains a DOI rather than a PII link to ScienceDirect, access won't work. That's because a DOI link isn't a one-step link directly to the publisher; a DOI link is a function that looks up the article metadata at yet another third party database, based on its DOI value, it then finds the desired link to the publisher and it then redirects the user to ScienceDirect (provided the article happens to be on SD). However, during the link lookup at the third party database, the SAML authentication response gets lost. So while a user may land on the expected article page... they will not be signed in. Example of such a WAYFless URL that is not expected to work:

https://auth.elsevier.com/ShibAuth/institutionLogin?entityID=https%3A%2F%2Fidp.eduserv.org.uk%2Fopenathens&appReturnURL=https%3A%2F%2Fdoi.org%2F10.1016%2Fj.epsl.2018.08.040

SciVal

Scopus

How do we set up a WAYFless URL at a third party service (link resolver, discovery service?

This is something that the third party should help you with. You can provide them with Elsevier WAYFless URL syntax and they will figure out how to implement it.

Not every third party service can be configured to generate an appropriate WAYFless URL. The interaction between so many so different services with all this different data, metadata and functionality can be quite complicated, and what we'd like isn't always possible in practice.

If third party isn't able to generate a proper WAYFless URL, your users, clicking on those links, will be landing in our products non-authenticated… but that's not the end of the world. They can still navigate to the WAYF discovery service and sign in via your institution or organization.

Was this answer helpful?

Thank you for your feedback, it will help us serve you better.
If you require assistance, please scroll down and use one of the contact options to get in touch.

For further assistance:

Chat Open in 3 Hours

Elsevier Access Support Center

How can I build a WAYFless URL to Elsevier products?

How can I build a WAYFless URL to Elsevier products?

Was this answer helpful?

Related Articles: