About Athens Authentication

The University uses the AthensDA system which means that you no longer have a separate Athens account.

Use your MWS (Managed Windows Service) username and password to login to Athens.

You can only login to Athens at the University's Athens login page.

If you don't need to use Athens to access a resource on campus, you won't need to use Athens to access the resource off campus. We will link to it via EZproxy instead.

Tips for Athens Login

1. Set this cookie on your PC to tell Athens that you are a member of the University of Liverpool.

   Once you have set this cookie, whenever you try to access another Athens Login page, you will automatically be redirected to the University of Liverpool's Athens login page. This is most useful if you usually use the same PC (either on- or off-campus). If you normally use University PC Centres then you will need to set the cookie every time you use a different PC.

2. If you have administrator rights to your PC, install the Athens Toolbar for Internet Explorer or Firefox.

   Used in conjunction with the Athens cookie (above) this gives you:

   • a permanent link to our Athens login page
   • a permanent indication of whether you are logged in to Athens
   • when you are logged in, links to all Athens-authenticated resources

3. You need only log in to Athens once in a session. All subsequent logins to Athens-authenticated resources will be automatic. You will still need to click on an Athens login link or button in the following resources, but you won't need to type in your username and password again:

   Blackwell Synergy - BMJ Journals - British Standards Online - All Census resources, Digimap - Extenza - Info4Education - all MIMAS resources - Mintel - Oxford English Dictionary - Sage Publications - ScienceDirect - Scopus.

4. You will remain logged in to Athens for the duration of the time that you are logged in to that machine or until it times out (after 8 hours).
5. If you need to open a new browser window, you should use File, New, Window (or Ctrl+N) in an existing browser window. If instead you launch a completely new Internet Explorer, you will not be logged in to Athens in that window.
6. The first time you use ScienceDirect, Scopus or Mintel with Athens, you have to fill in a registration form. This creates a 'hidden' account on that service, tied to your university account.

About EZproxy Authentication

Athens was developed for UK Higher Education market, so many resources do not use it. Instead we use EZproxy to provide access to those resources. Even where a resource does support Athens authentication we prefer to use EZproxy because most users find it simpler to use.

Our EZproxy server is on campus, and we route our links to IP-authenticated resources via EZproxy. Once you have logged in to the EZproxy server it downloads web pages for you and then relays them to you. It looks for other IP-authenticated links on the page and modifies them before it relays the page to you so that those links continue to be routed via EZproxy.

If you find that you cannot login to EZproxy for any reason then use the Windows Terminal Service (WTS) tinstead. See our off-campus page for more details.

How to log into EZproxy

Because we route our links via EZproxy, as soon as you need to use EZproxy you'll be prompted to login to it using your MWS username and password. Once you have logged in to EZproxy you will be able to follow links to other EZproxy-authenticated resources without having to login again.

Other Usernames and Passwords

Some resources do not use Athens authentication and do not use IP authentication either. Instead the supplier provides us with a separate username and password with which to login to their resource.

We provide these usernames and passwords on web pages. We limit these pages so that only members of the University of Liverpool can see them.

To find out what the username and password is:

• for databases, we will only link to the page which contains the password information. From there, there will be a link to the database itself.
• for e-journals, there will be a link with a key icon for Username/Password information.

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