Call to Action

The National Institute of Health (NIH) is introducing a new Login Service gateway to streamline external user access to NIH online resources.

To ensure there is appropriate authentication and identity proofing to meet US agency requirements, and to facilitate user access provisioning, NIH is calling federated identity providers (e.g., identity provider, or IdP, published in the InCommon Federation) to support 3 interoperability and assurance framework defined by the research and education community: 

• Streamlined user attribute release by supporting REFEDS Research & Scholarship (R&S) entity category. 
• Implement strong authentication: perform multi-factor authentication (MFA) and signal MFA using REFEDS MFA Profile. 
• Communicate identity proofing and assurance using the REFEDS Assurance Framework.

By September 15, 2021, NIH asks that you:

1. Adopt the REFEDS Research and Scholarship Entity Category (R&S) - Signal a standard set of basic, non-sensitive information (persistent unique identifier, name, email + affiliation)
2. Adopt the REFEDS MFA profile (https://refeds.org/profile/mfa) -  Signal your assurance of strong authentication (MFA)
3. Adopt the REFEDS Assurance Framework v1- Signal your assurance of the person’s identity (at min. “Local Enterprise”)

When Does All This Happen?

Full implementations all three elements will take time. Identity Provider operators in the InCommon Federation should begin planning and implementation as soon as possible, noting the following coming milestone dates:

What Do I Need to Do?

More About the NIH Resources

Electronic Research Administration Portal (eRA)

Effective September 15, 2021, eRA(https://era.nih.gov) will require all of its users to sign in with MFA. eRA will accept qualified federated credentials. To qualify, the IdP needs to authenticate the user using MFA and signals the outcome using REFEDS MFA Profile. In addition, eRA will require the IdP to release user attributes defined in the REFEDS R&S category.

About eRA and InCommon

eRA is NIH’s research administration portal. Principal Investigators and grant administrators from universities and research organizations use eRA to apply for and manage NIH-funded grants. eRA has about 40,000 users and over 204,000 grants in its database. Over 130,000 of the grants are issued to InCommon participants. 

Impact

Users who cannot sign in using a qualified credential from their home institution will be directed to create and use a login.gov credential to sign into eRA.

National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI; PubMed)

Effective June 2021, NCBI, including PubMed, will transition use only federated credentials for user access ( https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2021/01/05/important-changes-ncbi-accounts-2021/). 

PubMed requires a federated IdP to release attributes defined in R&S. It does not require MFA or eduPersonAssurance. 

About PubMed and InCommon

PubMed is one of the world’s largest online biomedical research databases. It has millions of users around the world. It is likely that all universities have some students or faculty accessing PubMed today. 

Researcher Auth Service (RAS)

RAS (https://datascience.nih.gov/researcher-auth-service-initiative), a component of the NIH Login Service launching in 2021, facilitates consistent and user-friendly access to NIH’s open and controlled data assets and repositories.