BIG DATA

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently joined the InCommon Federation to provide NSF’s research and education community simpler and easier access to online services.

Principal Investigators and Sponsored Projects Office officials from InCommon member institutions will soon be able to access NSF’s online services such as Research.gov and FastLane using their unique IDs and passwords from their home institutions.

NSF’s membership in InCommon will give users access to single sign-on technology, developed under an NSF grant, which allows researchers at member institutions to securely exchange online information and access web-based resources with one ID and password.

The InCommon Federation doubled in size during the last two years, now serving 146 organizations, including higher education institutions, U.S. government research labs and agencies, and commercial partners.  All told, InCommon reaches more than 3 million people in these organizations.

NSF plans to first allow participants from the more than 100 member universities to access a partnership of federal research-oriented grant making agencies at Research.gov and NSF’s site for submitting and reviewing proposals, FastLane.  For a list of participants, seehttp://www.incommonfederation.org/participants.

Research.gov, a modernization of FastLane, is a new web portal providing a broad range of information and grants management services for multiple federal agencies.  FastLane is an interactive, real-time system used to conduct NSF business over the Internet that has been used for more than 14 years by 250,000 researchers, students, faculty and other research professionals to manage their grants and proposals.

“NSF is always pleased to see important results come from NSF supported projects,” said George Strawn, NSF’s chief information officer.  “In this case, where our Middleware program has contributed to the emergence of InCommon, we’re particularly pleased because the relationships between NSF and its academic partners will be both simplified and made more secure by our joint collaboration.”

Streamlined access to federal research systems is a priority long desired by the research community, and through its membership in InCommon, NSF hopes to help meet the need.