The Australian Access Federation (AAF) Inc. is currently developing and deploying production grade infrastructure to facilitate trusted electronic communications and collaboration within and between Australian and international higher education and research institutions. The aim of the AAF is to provide a means of allowing a member institution to trust the information it receives from another member so that access to resources and secure communication can be conducted seamlessly, in a way that will support effective collaboration between users.

The AAF will provide the framework to enable researchers, staff members and students at member universities or research institutions to login using a single account issued by their own institution and access a wide range of potential resources internal and external to the institution, including:

• data collections and data grids;
• scientific instruments, modelling and visualisation tools, and computing resources;
• collaboration environments and workspaces for virtual teams;
• scholarly resources and publications;
• e-learning resources and learning object collections; and
• national higher education and research administrative systems.

This means:

• users can collaborate more easily with colleagues because it is easier to share access to tools and resources; and
• users need to remember only one account from their own institution instead of requesting and remembering accounts from several different resource providers.

The AAF Inc. will allow service providers to provide access to their resources or services to authorised users in a secure way without having to issue or manage user accounts.

Institutions will benefit from the AAF Inc. by enabling their research, academic, and administrative users to access a wide range of resources and to collaborate more easily with colleagues in Australia and in other countries with which the AAF has a peering relationship.