Access to Commercial Resources

Owned by Scott Cantor
Last updated: Mar 05, 2024
2 min read

The Shibboleth Consortium does not do or provide any of the following:

  • We do NOT provide a service operating our software on behalf of any other organization.

  • We do NOT provide access to commercial journals, databases, or other online resources.

  • We do NOT substitute for paying for contractual access to commercial journals, databases, or other online resources.

  • We do NOT offer “membership” that has anything to do with that kind of access.

This is a frequent source of confusion and leads to unintentional requests to “join” the Consortium, or to “get access” to things. That’s not what we are and not what we do. Our FAQ also addresses this.

When a commercial service references “using Shibboleth”, that is generally a misnomer on their part; what they mean is that they offer the ability to organizations that operate software compatible with the SAML 2.0 standard to regulate and manage access by those organizations to their resources. It does NOT mean that individuals can “join Shibboleth” to get that access or that we have any role in the contracts that allow that access.

We make software for organizations' IT staff to download and run, for free, to help them manage their users' access to these kinds of services and, unlike commercial products like Okta or Microsoft, we handle this in a way that scales and avoids having to set this up one by one for every possible service. But that’s it.

Joining the Consortium is solely about financially supporting our software development and maintenance. If that’s not what you’re after, then you’re in the wrong place.

Thanks for your interest.