The Australian Access Federation (AAF) Inc. is a significant and growing part of the Australian eResearch landscape which is developing and deploying production grade infrastructure to facilitate trusted electronic communications and collaboration within and between universities and research institutions in Australia.

The AAF has a current portfolio of services, supporting both teaching and learning and research, available to subscribers. The AAF uses cutting edge technologies to provide a range of automatic identification services which will allow authentication of people (researchers, teachers and students) and resources (servers, services, networks, instruments and data). It enables resource owners to identify and authorise a researcher to access online resources, such as computer facilities, data and other research infrastructure, at their home institution, at other Australian institutions, and around the world. Just as you can use your Facebook or Google identity to connect to other sites that accept them, you can use your research or education identity to connect to sites that are part of the AAF.

• Visit the Service Catalogue to explore enabled services
• Suggest a service for the Federation
• See International Federation Catalogues
• Find out more about our Subscribers and their services through Case Studies

Utilisation figures

• See 2011 utilisation overview

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 provides a secure authentication 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. This means you can access things that are only available for users in research and education, 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 allows 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 benefit from the AAF 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.