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[Dean Woodbeck <>]

InCommon Expands to Include Research Organizations

Ann Arbor, Mich. – June 21, 2011 – Research organizations, including government labs and virtual organizations, can now join InCommon and take advantage of federated identity management for shared services, scientific collaborations, and other online applications.

“By joining InCommon, scientists at U.S. research facilities and universities can more easily share resources, which will improve collaboration,” said Jack Suess, chair of the InCommon Steering Committee and vice provost of information technology and chief information officer at UMBC. “With the close connection between universities and research organizations, and the growing popularity of virtual organizations, this should be a big boost and time saver for all of our participants.”

This is the third category of organizations now eligible to join InCommon. In addition to research organizations, the 290 participants include higher education institutions and sponsored partners – companies and non-profits that offer web-based resources and services. InCommon is operated by Internet2 and provides a suite of trust services for the U.S. education and research communities.

Particular interest and motivation came from Science Identity Federation, a project funded by the Department of Energy Office of Science, and organized by Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab with support from other DOE national labs and facilities. 

Fostering collaboration is one of the main objectives of the InCommon Federation. The federation provides a secure and privacy-protecting method for giving individuals access to protected or licensed online resources, such as library databases, multimedia content, research information, collaboration tools, and services provided by government agencies. In a federation, all participating organizations agree on standard policies, practices and technology standards for all interactions, making it easily scalable. 

For more information on InCommon and a full list of participants, visit: http://www.incommon.org

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ABOUT InCOMMON
InCommon serves the U.S. education and research communities, supporting a common framework of trust services and operating the InCommon Federation, the U.S. trust federation for research and education, and the community-driven InCommon

Certificate Service. The InCommon Federation enables scalable, trusted collaborations among its community of participants. Identity Providers give their users single sign-on convenience and privacy protection, while Service Providers control access to their protected resources. The Certificate Service offers unlimited certificates to the U.S.  higher education community for one fixed annual fee. For more information, see www.incommon.org.

ABOUT INTERNET2

Internet2 is an advanced networking consortium led by the research and education community. An exceptional partnership spanning U.S. and international institutions who are leaders in the worlds of research, academia, industry and government, Internet2 is developing breakthrough cyberinfrastructure technologies that support the most exacting applications of today—and spark the most essential innovations of tomorrow. Led by its members and focused on their current and future networking needs since 1996, Internet2 blends its human, IP and optical networks to develop and deploy revolutionary Internet technologies.  For more information see www.internet2.edu.