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Background for the AAA Study

Supporting and promoting scientific research and innovation as well enabling access to scientific information are key priorities for the European Commission and for the Member States.

The rapid development and adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has changed the way researchers work, enabling almost instantaneous collaboration regardless of physical location and has provided access to an enormous amount of scientific information that can be processed on powerful computational platforms. This new way of working has generated and generates a huge volume of data, whose exchange and curation pose significant challenges.

To address this point. the High-Level Expert Group on Scientific Data (also known as HLEG on Scientific Data) recommends in its report (Riding the Wave )  the creation of a directive to set up a unified authentication and authorisation system, which they envision would pave the way to distributed and collaborative authentication, authorisation and accounting (AAA) for scientific data. As a result of the recommendations of the HLEG on Scientific Data, the European Commission has tendered to award funding to study the feasibility and impact of adapting the existing, widely used AAA platforms and services to be fully compliant with the requirements posed by the use of data/information resources (such as papers).

A bid  in responce to the calls for tender was submitted in the summer 2011 and awarded to the Consortium in December 2011.                                                                                                                                                

Aim of the AAA Study

The goal of the study was to evaluate the feasibility of delivering an integrated Authentication and Authorisation (and possibly accounting) Infrastructure, AAI, to help the emergence of a robust platform  (Scientific Data Infrastructure) for access to and preservation of scientific information.

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