CUNY Academic Commons

In speaking today to a colleague at CUNY OLS, I heard about a problem that CUNY community members are having when they try to submit URLs to OpenEd, which tracks open educational resources for CUNY publications. OpenEd is being used by OLS to help with discovery and sharing of the open resources it funds (including the CAC).

Here's what is happening:

1. User goes to https://opened.cuny.edu/ and logs in
2. User clicks "Add OER" > Submit from Web > Add Link
3. User is taken to https://opened.cuny.edu/courses/add
4. User enters a URL like https://asianheritage.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
5. User gets a message saying "Invalid link - page does not exist"

In talking with OLS, they said what's happening is that the OpenEd site is visits the URL to capture screenshot. It uses HTTP to see if the site is up. The CUNY Academic Commons returns a 403

I'm not sure whether this is an issue with our platform or whether the denial is happening at a server level, maybe through cloudflare. But I would like to see whether we could work on this to allow URLs to be submitted through this site.

Screenshots attached