By Mikkel Hald, 03/06/26
The media company NB Medier (“NB Media”) has now joined WAYF as a service provider. The technical integration has been completed, enabling Danish and North Atlantic research and education institutions to provide access to NB Medier’s services using users’ familiar institutional logins.
NB Medier publishes independent, subscription-based specialist media focusing on Danish politics, public administration and welfare-related policy areas. Its services include NB Beskæftigelse, NB Økonomi and other targeted news and knowledge resources for professional users.
University College Absalon (“PHA”) will be the first of NB Medier’s customers to take advantage of the new opportunity. PHA’s library wishes to provide users with access to NB Beskæftigelse (“NB Labour Market”) via the institution’s internal login while also gaining better insight into the use of the digital publishing resource.
Usage statistics are, in fact, an important part of the value proposition for libraries and institutions. When a service is accessed through WAYF, it becomes straightforward to make institution-level usage statistics available without the institution having to establish and maintain separate technical solutions for that purpose.
The connection of NB Medier is another example of how publishing and media services are moving from IP-based access control to access via single sign-on (“SSO”). This development is currently being driven in part by major international publishers, which increasingly prefer SSO-based access over access based on institutional IP addresses.
For institutions, this means a more coherent user experience: students and staff can access relevant digital resources using the same login credentials they already use for the institution’s other services. For service providers, it simultaneously offers a more modern and scalable access model.
The major international academic publishers are already available to institutions in WAYF through SSO, either directly through WAYF or through other identity federations in eduGAIN. It therefore remains an important task to bring into the shared digital identity infrastructure of the research and education sector those publishers and media services that do not yet offer SSO to their institutional customers. Service providers in the target group that have not yet connected are welcome to contact the WAYF Secretariat for assistance.
Institutions wishing to access NB Medier’s services using their internal digital identities need only contact NB Medier and let them know.