History

Eduserv's Access and Identity Management heritage stems from the development of the innovative and highly successful Athens technology to control access to web-based subscription services.

The Athens service was designed and developed in 1994, coming into active use in the UK higher education community in 1996. It provided access to many centrally-funded web-based services and was the de-facto standard in UK higher education, further education and research councils for access management.

In August 2000 Eduserv was awarded a JISC contract for the provision of authentication services to the UK higher and further education communities such that the service was freely available at the point of use by these institutions. The contract was twice extended, finally coming to an end on July 31, 2008. 

Also in 2000, Athens was adopted by the National Health Service Information Authority to control access to the National electronic Library for Health (NeLH). This contract was extended in July 2007 for a further five years with Athens providing access and identity management for many of the services provided under this umbrella (in 2009 this came under the control of NICE and is now branded NHS Evidence). 

The Athens service continues today with the new OpenAthens architecture continuing to make use of the service for the provision a managed directory service, the provision of diagnostics and statistics and access to electronic resources that have not yet upgraded to the OpenAthens SP product.