Globus-eRA Integration: Foundational Milestone for New Researcher Auth Service

January 10, 2020  | datascience.nih.gov

NIH staff and extramural researchers with an electronic Research Administration (eRA) Commons account can now use those credentials with Globus to access resources and services. This integration is the result of a partnership between the NIH Center for Information Technology and Globus, a division of the University of Chicago that provides data management capabilities—including managed data transfer and sharing—to research organizations.

When a researcher visits Globus, he or she will be able to login using eRA Commons credentials thanks to the OpenID Connect protocol. This new NIH capability provides greater flexibility and can be rapidly adopted and extended to support other integration partners in the future.

About the Researcher Auth Service Initiative

The NIH is the largest biomedical research agency in the world and home to many valuable data resources and platforms at the forefront of data science for data research. These resources are currently located in separate systems with each system requiring a separate login even if it uses the same credentials as another system.

Because these resources are currently siloed, researchers must manage multiple credentials when attempting to access multiple NIH-funded data platforms while conducting their research. Researchers are unable to move from system to system using one set of credentials, which causes delays in accessing information and completing full research exercises.

To reduce the burden on researchers’ access to data, the Researcher Auth Service (RAS) will be a service provided by NIH's Center for Information Technology to facilitate access to NIH’s open and controlled data assets and repositories in a consistent and user-friendly manner. The RAS initiative is advancing data infrastructure and ecosystem goals defined in the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science.

Read the original article: https://datascience.nih.gov/data-infrastructure/researcher-auth-service