Introduction
The pain of manual authentication in academic research and how automation can help
Introduction
Every academic researcher knows the pain: you're in the middle of literature review, Claude finds 30 relevant papers, and now you need to manually log into your university portal, navigate through the proxy server, authenticate with each publisher's SSO system, solve CAPTCHA challenges, and finally access the PDFs. By the time you're done, you've lost your research flow and spent 2 hours on what should be automated.
This episode teaches you to build an MCP server that ethically automates authentication workflows while preserving your legitimate institutional access. You'll learn to handle form-based logins, SSO/SAML flows, session persistence, and MFA challenges—all while maintaining security and ethical standards.
What you'll build: A production-ready MCP server that automates authentication to institutional resources, preserves session state across Claude conversations, handles multiple authentication patterns, manages credential security properly, and integrates seamlessly with Claude Code.