Interview of Licia Florio: a single login to boost the potential of research and innovation

Licia Florio is the coordinator of the project AARC (Authentication and Authorisation for Research and Collaboration), funded by the European Union. AARC fosters research collaborations by creating a common framework for authentication and authorisation, which allows hundreds of researchers to share data and software across institutions and countries.

Co-financed by Horizon 2020, the Research and Innovation programme of the EU, the project ran from May 2017 until April 2019 and received around EUR 3 million of EU funding.

As the project recently came to an end, we have asked Licia to tell us more on the achievements of AARC 2.

What is the first and primary objective of AARC 2?

AARC championed the adoption of federated access by international research collaborations for managing their users and sharing their resources in a secure and interoperable way. Researchers do not work in isolation, they need to collaborate and share resources, but at the same time they need to control who has access to what. Federated access has firmly established itself as an enabler to access and share resources in a user-friendly way, whilst preserving security and user privacy. The advantage of federated access is that users can access different services with the same credentials (no need to register with each service, no need to remember multiple passwords), verified by the users’ home institutions.

The main objective for the AARC project was to define an Authentication and Authorisation framework that builds on federated access but that could scale to different research collaboration needs.

AARC achieved this by delivering one BluePrint Architecture (BPA), one set of policy frameworks and one set of training modules that support research collaborations in creating an AARC-compliant authentication and authorisation infrastructure (AAI).

Why research collaborations are essential?

Research has always depended on collaboration. Peer reviewing, publishing and building upon prior scientific work has been at the core of scientific collaboration. Today, research collaborations gather researchers active in the same field and provide a framework for them to collaborate in larger or smaller groups, debate results and share resources and knowledge; this is one of the key drivers to advance scientific innovation. There are different areas of research, such as medical, biomedical, Earth observation, high-energy physics, linguistics and so on. Research collaborations may be virtual entities brought together by funding opportunities or common projects as well as real legal entities. Clustering organisations in the same field of expertise offers economic benefits, as researchers can access remote resources available in one of the participating organisations in a given research collaboration.

Did the project meet its goal? What will come next?

The AARC2 project has been very successful and effective and has had a very big impact among research and e-infrastructures in what concerns the adoption of federated access and the deployment of AAIs. The AARC BPA and the accompanying policy framework have become the de-facto standard to build an AAI for researchers, adopted by research and e-Infrastructures and the EC funded projects implementing the European Open Science Cloud

AARC has demonstrated that it is possible to provide solutions in a technology-agnostic way, without being prescriptive and with the support and engagement of the wider research community. The key to success was the very diverse composition of the consortium, where different parties and perspectives could be represented and balanced. By doing this, AARC offered a neutral forum, but at the same time it also made available unique expertise to address both technical and policy aspects and to connect to existing efforts. Having the project framework (and the budget linked to it) and an open nature allowed AARC to create a community.

Although the AARC project has formally finished the AARC community is still vibrant. The AARC community, thanks to many individual contributions, continues its work and will maintain and build upon the AARC results now that the project has ended. The AARC community will ensure that neutrality, which has characterised the AARC2 project, is preserved and that it will continue to function as the central place for further work on the AARC BPA.

AARC2 created the AEGIS (AARC Engagement Group for Infrastructures) group, to gathers research and e-infrastructures AAI operators with the aim to exchange experiences in deploying AARC2 results and recommendations. AEGIS is active and we aim to expand its membership, as more and more research infrastructures are deploying AARC BPA-complaint AAIs.

Is EU funding important for European research? How has it contributed to AARC 2 success?

EU funding is very important for European research and for innovation in general. Without the European funding, the AARC project would not have existed. Having the European funding created the glue to bring experts together, for them to work on a common vision and to support them to get together in person. Based on the AARC experience, we believe that focused and limited in time (max 4 year) funding can be very effective in boosting results in a specific area.

More information

Check out the new home of the AARC community
Short video Start with AARC - Blueprint Architecture
Video Start with AARC - Policy Development Kit
Video on the experiences from research collaborations- AARC in action
Website of the project AARC
Cordis Article : Next generation Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure for research communities
Article "Research collaboration via single login"