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I'm a librarian or administrator and my users are having trouble signing in via federated access
Last updated on March 02, 2026
Your institution has had Shibboleth or OpenAthens access to your Elsevier subscriptions enabled and working for some time, but now one or more users have reported that it doesn't work anymore.
You'll need to determine the extent of the problem. Sometimes a problem is due to a network, code, browser issue, and it may affect many customers. Its advisable to follow some basic steps to try and identify it. Here are some checks that should help you navigate there before you look through the logs or contact support.
If you are setting up a new IdP, please visit our set up page, first.
If this user is entitled to access your subscriptions with us, please determine whether a problem is limited to this user, their specific group, or your whole IdP:
- Are you able to access the service with your own credentials?
- Is anyone else at your library having the same problem?
You need to find what is different about that user or what is different about what they are doing.
- Is your user assigned to the correct group? Some IdPs make use of an affiliation attribute and if the IdP is not releasing the value we expect, we will not let the user in.
- Does the user have sufficient privileges? Many federations require eduPersonEntitlement to be released; if a member IdP is not releasing it, we will not let the user in.
- How is the user accessing the product? The path is important because the failure may be due to an incorrect or missing WAYFless URL.
Your entityID identifies your institution and it should be known to you. It is published in your IdP metadata; if you aren't able to find it, please contact your IT or your federation, depending on who has configured your software for you. EntityID is unique to your institution; there can be other identity providers in the metadata with a similar name to your institution's name, and there may be multiple entities by your institution in the federation metadata at any time. We can't know which one is currently being used by your institution, we rely on you to tell us that.
None of the users of our IdP are able to successfully access our subscribed product anymore. What do I do?
Please contact us using one of the contact options at the foot of this page. If you have more than one subscription with us, please test the others as well. When contacting support, please provide the following:
- Name of your institution
- Your entityID
- Description of the problem
- The steps you take to access the product
- If you get an error message, a screenshot and/or the text of the message where the URL of the page is clearly visible
Our support team will investigate whether your institutional account is set up correctly. They may, depending on the nature of the problem, ask some additional questions of you.
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