Help

RUSH University and RUMC affiliates may access most library resources (e.g., PubMed, CINAHL, eBooks, ILLiad, etc.) from off campus with their RUSH single sign-on (SSO) username and password.

These are the same credentials you use for your RUSH email (@rush.edu), your on-campus PC, the University Portal, and My Apps. If you have a working login for one of these services but aren’t able to access a specific library resource, please contact the Library Services Desk by phone at (312) 942-5950, by chat, or by email at library@rush.edu for assistance.

If you cannot remember your RUSH information (email address or password), please contact the RUSH Information Services Service Desk (formerly Help Desk) at (312) 942-4357, or 2-HELP from any house phone. As the library uses RUSH single sign-on for all online resources, our staff cannot assist with account creation, recovery, or reactivation, and we cannot reset your RUSH password.

To access materials, start at the Library of RUSH University Medical Center's home page. Click the link to the resource you need, and you will be prompted for your username and password. Once you have successfully signed in, you will be taken to the resource.

The library uses OpenAthens to provide authenticaiton to the majority of our resources. Many of our major publishers and content providers participate in the OpenAthens federation, including Ovid, ProQuest, ScienceDirect, SpringerNature, JAMA, ClinicalKey, EBSCOhost, NEJM, Oxford University Press, Taylor & Francis, and Mary Ann Liebert, and others. 

In addition to using a link on the library's website, It's often possible to sign in directly by selecting the OpenAthens or "institutional login" option on a database, e-journal, or other resource's website. Each website presents the OpenAthens login process slightly differently, so it isn't possible for us to provide detailed instructions, but we encourage you to contact the library if you have questions need assistance. 

When preparing links that will be provided to off-campus users, it's important to make sure that the user is given an opportunity to log in with their RUSH username and password. Otherwise, they may be denied access, prompted to purchase the content, offered the option to log in with a personal account which they do not have, or experience other confusing behavior. 

This is done by adding a prefix to the link that directs it through EZproxy or OpenAthens, the two authentication systems used by the library. When a user clicks a prefixed link, they will be prompted to sign in with their RUSH username and password before they are passed on to the resource.

Most resources can use either OpenAthens or EZproxy, but in almost all cases OpenAthens is preferred. 

The library is happy to provide assistance with off campus access to our resources. Please contact us with any questions about EZproxy or OpenAthens, proxied and redirected links, or any other aspect of this topic.

OpenAthens and 'redirector' links

Use the following page to generate links to OpenAthens-authenticated resources:

https://go.openathens.net/generate/rush.edu/71962721

These links are referred to as OpenAthens redirector links. Only redirector links generated by this tool should be used. Do not attempt to construct OpenAthens redirector links by hand. 

Though the OpenAthens redirector relies on a base URL in much the same way as EZproxy, there are important differences. Unlike EZproxy, not all OpenAthens resources can use the redirector, and the query string containing the destination URL must be URL-encoded. Both of these are accounted for by the redirector link generator (for instance, if you provide a URL that is not compatible with the redirector, the tool will decline to process it). 

EZproxy and 'proxied' links

EZproxy is invoked by adding a prefix or base URL to the resource's URL. Unlike OpenAthens, there is no link generator.

RUSH's EZproxy prefix is:

https://login.ezproxy.rush.edu/login?url=

For example, the following is a link to “4.3.8 Lining of the nasal cavity,” a video in Acland's Anatomy. For most on-campus users, the following link is sufficient:

https://aclandanatomy.com/MultimediaPlayer.aspx?multimediaId=10528401

However, this link won’t work for off-campus users, who would be denied access. In order for RUSH users to sign in and use this link from off campus, the EZproxy prefix must be added. With the prefix, the full URL would be:

https://login.ezproxy.rush.edu/login?url=https://aclandanatomy.com/MultimediaPlayer.aspx?multimediaId=10528401

Important notes and exceptions:

1. Only resources purchased by RUSH can to be proxied; as a rule of thumb, it is only appropriate to invoke EZproxy cases where an off-campus user would be denied access or promopted to purchase access. If the EZproxy prefix is added to a website that EZproxy is not configured to use, it will result in an error message. 
2. Be sure that you aren’t providing (or prefixing) URLs that have already been rewritten to pass through EZproxy. Proxied links will have a domain (the part of the URL immediately following https://) that ends with ezproxy.rush.edu. Using the example above, the proxied domain for Acland's Anatomy would be aclandanatomy-com.ezproxy.rush.edu. Note that links copied from your browser when accessing resources from off campus (and many on-campus locations) are likely to be proxied. 
3. There's no need to prefix "friendly" links from the library's website. Friendly URLs begin with https://library.rush.edu. For example, the friendly link to CINAHL is https://library.rush.edu/cinahl.
4. Similarly, there is no need to prefix catalog permalinks. 
5. EZproxy and the OpenAthens redirector should not be combined. Do not proxy OpenAthens redirector links. 

If use a link in an email alert, RSS feed or a non-RUSH website, the link may not have the RUSH University Library proxy prefix. The proxy prefix routes your request through a RUSH IP address, allowing the publisher to identify you as a RUSH user. When it is absent, you may be asked to purchase articles even if they are covered by RUSH's subscriptions.

Drag this button to your bookmarks toolbar → Reload through RUSH

If you reach one of RUSH's IP-authenticated resources from a non-RUSH IP address, clicking the bookmarklet will attempt to re-load the page through RUSH's proxy server. Note that reloading non-RUSH resources with this tool will result in an error message; it can only work when reloading a domain that the proxy server has been configured to use.