User Management

Overview

To help academic institutions maintain control over who can access Dewey, we allow university admins to manage user access on the platform. This feature allows university-affiliated librarians to manually review and change the access status of any university-affiliated researcher.

Dewey requires each user to have a dedicated account on the platform. This enables researchers to save datasets directly to their account, collaborate with co-authors, and receive critical email notifications regarding data download status, issues, or team invites. Because of this, we do not offer IP-based access to the Dewey platform.

How it Works

Dewey Creates a Team & Assigns Admin(s)

Dewey will create a dedicated “Team” for your institution. You can assign one or more Admin Users (typically librarians) who are responsible for reviewing and managing access.

✅ Admins can approve or deny access
✅ Admins receive email notifications of new users
✅ Admins can view historical approvals and revoke access at any time

Approving New Users

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Dewey offers Single Sign-On (SSO) integrations for university-wide subscribers to automate user creation and account approval.
The following workflow is for institutional subscribers not utilizing SSO.

1. New User Registers With a University Email

When a user signs up with a domain like @northstate.edu, our system automatically places their account into a pending state and notifies the designated Admin(s).

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The user will not have access until manually approved.

2. Admin Receives Email Notification

Admins will be directed to the platform where they can review a list of pending approvals.

The admin will also see a notification in the app if there are new pending approvals.

3. Admin Reviews & Approves (or Denies)

In the Admin Dashboard, librarians can:

View pending approvals
Approve or deny requests
Optionally (coming soon): set an expiration date for temporary access

Once the decision is made:

✅ The user receives an email indicating whether they’ve been approved or denied
✅ Approved users gain immediate access to Dewey’s platform

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For departmental or school subscribers, you will often "deny" researchers because they are not associated with the subscribed group, even if they are a valid researcher from another group on campus.
Since permissions are team-specific, you are only denying them access permissions for this team, not globally. That user will still be able to access datasets if they are members of a separate team.

User Roles

There are two types of roles for institutional accounts:

Admins: Can approve and review users and view other admin tools.
Downloaders: Members who can download the permissioned datasets.

For non-institutional teams, there is also the following role:

Member: A view-only member of a team who cannot download data.

Additional Admin Tools

Admins can also:

Review past approvals
See who was approved and when, including denied users
Sort & filter user list
Filter by account creation date or approval date
Revoke access at any time
Remove users from the system with a single click

Best Practices for Librarians

Assign at least two admins for redundancy
Check pending requests regularly to ensure timely access
Revoke access for graduated or inactive users quarterly