What should I know about Elsevier SP and its REFEDS metadata?

ScienceDirect, Scopus, SciVal, Embase, EngineeringVillage, Knovel, PharmaPendium, Reaxys, ClinicalKey

but also many others:

Developer Portal, eCommerce, Clinical Pharmacology, ClinicalKey Student, Elsa, EM-Consulte, ExpertPath, Funding Institutional, Global Store, ImmunoQuery, JBS, Journal Finder, Mendeley, PATHPrimer, RADPrimer, Regional eCommerce Platform (M2), Researcher Academy, Reviewer Hub, STATdx, Support-Hubs, User Privacy Center

All these services are owned by Elsevier and adhere to the same data handling terms.

We only need one but there’s no way for us to communicate this through metadata: We prefer PairwiseID, but most IdPs don’t support it yet. The next best option, SubjectID, is supported even less. ePTID is still widely used in the community, although deprecated for many years; it remains for backward compatibility. We also support Persistent NameID for IdPs unable to release any of the three, but don’t want to encourage any newly configured IdP to consider it.

You can find more details about our attribute requirements here: https://service.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/38192/supporthub/elsevieraccess/

The entityID=https://sdauth.sciencedirect.com/ dates back to when the SP was first developed years ago and reflects the original ScienceDirect name. Initially, each product had its own SP, but as more products adopted SAML authentication, managing them separately became unsustainable. To simplify, we kept the most widely used SP and turned it into a SAML proxy for all products.

If you search for entityID=https://sdauth.sciencedirect.com/ in the REFEDS metadata explorer, you’ll see multiple sets:

https://met.refeds.org/met/entity/https%253A%252F%252Fsdauth.sciencedirect.com%252F/?federation=edugain

This is due to legacy reasons; before eduGAIN, our metadata was added to various national federations, and many still retain it. We’re gradually cleaning this up, but changes carry risks for existing users, so we’re proceeding in stages.

The authoritative metadata set is available in eduGAIN, exported from InCommon.