The Athens Access Management System (AMS) delivers authentication, authorization, and distributed user administration services. For the student or lecturer this means that they are able to use a single user name and password to access many of the resources used in their study or research. It also means that if the institution is set up for IP authentication only, which is usually the case, then lecturers and students are not restricted to campus only access.

When a user connects to one of our products via Athens they point their browser at a slightly different URL than the one they would use for normal on-campus IP access. This URL will take the user to the Athens Single Sign On (SSO) page, where they will be prompted to enter their Athens username and password.

The Athens database holds user profiles and information that will check to see if the user is set up for access to our product. If authentication is successful the Athens server passes an affirmative message to our server, which then allows the user access. For more information about Athens please visit their website at: http://www.athens.ac.uk