Researcher Auth Service Initiative

The NIH is the largest biomedical research agency in the world and home to many valuable data resources and platforms at the forefront of data science. These resources are stewarded by the NIH Institutes, Centers, and Office.  The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Researcher Auth Service (RAS) service is part of NIH’s efforts toward a modernized, FAIR, biomedical data ecosystem. RAS facilitates access to NIH’s open and controlled access data assets and repositories in a consistent, secure, and use-friendly manner and provides researchers with a single sign-on experience across participating data resources.  This service is provided by the NIH’s Center for Information Technology and developed in collaboration with the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science.

NIH RAS is advancing data infrastructure and ecosystem goals as defined in the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science by leveraging appropriate policies that promote stewardship and sustainability, including the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) and OpenID standards for integration of researcher-focused applications and data repositories over the OpenID Connect (OIDC) platform. By offering a cloud-based, centralized authentication, authorization, and audit logging service (see diagram), NIH RAS is enhancing the overall security posture of the NIH data ecosystem. With RAS, NIH-supported data systems delegate important identity and access controls to this central NIH service – NIH RAS. For researchers working in the NIH data ecosystem, NIH RAS provides a single sign-on (SSO) experience that enhances the user experience when searching for and accessing NIH’s open and controlled data assets.