OpenURL is a JISC-sponsored service (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/), and is administered jointly by UKOLN (http://ukoln.ac.uk) and EDINA (http://edina.ac.uk/).
openurl.ac.uk is the home of the OpenURL Router
The OpenURL Router is sponsored by the JISC (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/) and administered by EDINA (http://edina.ac.uk/) in association with UKOLN (http://ukoln.ac.uk/). The Router is provided to all HE and FE institutions in the UK, with the aim of
The OpenURL Router works by offering a central registry of institutions' OpenURL resolvers. An institution registers details of its resolver just once, at openurl.ac.uk. When the resolver has been registered at openurl.ac.uk, any service provider can provide users from that institution with OpenURL links to their resolver.
Without the OpenURL Router, linking requires configuration of links between each institution with a resolver and each service provider on a pairwise basis. Each institution must arrange for links to be set up with each service to which they subscribe, and if the resolver is changed, this process must be repeated. Each service provider has to maintain tables mapping each of their end users to their institutions, and institutions to resolvers.
Service providers who use UK federation or IP address checking can build resolver configuration around the authorisation mechanism, which permits them to identify users' institutions. Free access services do not use authorisation, which is a major problem for providing OpenURL links: without an existing mechanism to identify users or which institutions they belong to, the service has no means of determining the correct resolver to link to. The service provider would have to implement a system such as IP address checking just to support OpenURL, but the overheads are so large that this is unlikely to be a realistic proposition. As well as denying the benefits of OpenURL linking to these services, this situation restricts the value for money offered by resolvers by eliminating potential "entry points" for their intended users.
The OpenURL Router enables institutions to register their resolver once only, at openurl.ac.uk. Service providers can use openurl.ac.uk as the "base URL" for OpenURL links for UK HE and FE customers. It will not be necessary for institutions to configure their resolvers at each separate service, or for service providers to maintain tables mapping users to resolvers.
The details registered at openurl.ac.uk can also include the preferred icon/button image, and the preferred "alt" text to use with it. This is not just a cosmetic detail; it provides users with consistent links to their resolver from whichever service they are using.
Service providers can use openurl.ac.uk as the "base URL" for all of their OpenURL links for UK HE and FE customers, and can construct the link using a button image provided by the Router. Service providers can also make a lookup request to openurl.ac.uk, and receive an XML response with details of a user's resolver, and button image and "alt" text. This can be done without maintaining any tables mapping IP addresses or UK federation scopes on to specific resolvers or button images.
If an OpenURL aware service provider does not choose to use openurl.ac.uk, their customers will of course still be obliged to configure links to their resolvers. In this case an institution can simply configure the links using openurl.ac.uk as the base URL. The OpenURL links in that service will direct users to their local resolver via the OpenURL Router. This will be transparent to users, but in the event of the resolver being changed the institution would then only need to make a single change to their configuration registered with openurl.ac.uk.
The linking options available to service providers also apply to services without authorisation, where no information is held that identifies users or institutions. The OpenURL Router provides the necessary functionality to these services to enable them to link users to their institutions' OpenURL resolvers. This will provide OpenURL links where this would not previously have been possible.
The OpenURL Router does not affect the information encoded in OpenURL links (in OpenURL parlance, the base URL is manipulated, but the query remains unchanged). The end result will be just as if the original OpenURL link had been addressed directly to a local resolver.
This means that the OpenURL Router is not dependent on any particular version of the OpenURL standard. There is no intention to enforce compliance with the standard.
The OpenURL Router does not include access control, and all requests will be redirected to the appropriate local resolver. This does not affect security, since the OpenURL Router does not enable any HTTP requests that could not have been made anyway. Of course, local resolvers are free to add access control if desired.
OpenURL is a JISC-sponsored service (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/), and is administered jointly by UKOLN (http://ukoln.ac.uk) and EDINA (http://edina.ac.uk/).