While Open Science initiatives in the EU and elsewhere have noble goals, they need to deal with the realities of privacy, copyright, and national laws.
This leads to the need for appropriate authentication and access controls, both in the creation of content and its dissemination. The FIM4L Working Group is maintaining a list of use cases which require controls for authentication and authorisation in the frame of open science.
These requirements come up in several spaces, divided into processing and published stages:
Processing stage (Data processing and conducting science)
- Open Science collaboration infrastructure – Scientists need a variety of collaboration tools for creating open access content and want integrated security and privacy during the process.
- Citizen sciences user identification and authentication – Citizen science can involve large numbers of the general population and needs identity and authentication to insure the authenticity of the data being provided and to know who is the author of that content.
- University Press pre-publication processes – The publication cycle needs identity and authentication to ensure that peer review is secure and privacy preserving. Preprints also need security to protect their integrity.
Published stage (Data, articles/journals, eBooks etc.)
- Institutional repositories – Repositories may need to implement a number of controls, such as time and geo embargoes, restrictions on copyright such as photographs, domain specific licenses, etc.
- Data repositories – Sensitive data needs access controls; data sets for some domains are restricted to researchers in those domains; the integrity of the data needs to be protected by its owners.
- University Press publications – Copyright such as photographs, domain specific licenses, citizenship limitations, etc. need to be deployed.
- Open Educational Resources – Copyright and licensing issues occur here too. Also, there is the need to measure usage to establish the value and demographics of the resources.
- If the Open Access platform allows for reviews and comments, it is important to know the author of such contributions.
In all these use cases, an authentication and authorisation infrastructure (AAI) is needed, even if the main published content is open access. FIM4L is continuously collecting further such use cases and gives guidelines to libraries on how to deploy and use AAI technologies, while preserving as much privacy as possible.
This blog post was written by the LIBER FIM4L Working Group. Would you like to keep on top of the latest developments in federated access in research libraries? Learn more about the Working Group’s activities.
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