AAF Annual Report 2023

Australian Access Federation (AAF) Annual Report 2023

We would like to thank our community for your for your continued support of the Australian Access Federation (AAF) in 2024. 
 
It’s been a milestone year, where we celebrated the AAF turning 15. Established in June 2009 we’ve been providing trust and identity services to connect and protect the research and higher education sector for 15 years.  
 
Through our identity Federation, we have continued to enable secure connection and collaboration, between education and research institutions, providing access to over 990 national and international services that support teaching, learning and research. As experts in trust and identity we have enabled over 6.1M authentications in the past 12 months and are a part of a global network of over 87 federations.  
 
We’ve continued to build on our official recognition in 2023 as the national capability delivering trust and identity services for the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). This recognition builds on a long history of co-designing trust and identity solutions for national research infrastructures, which has seen us work closely with Australia’s research infrastructure providers including the CSIRO, Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), National Imaging Facility (NIF), Microscopy Australia, ACCESS-NRI, Australian BioCommons, Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN), Australian Plant Phenomics Network (APPN) and the Atlas of Living Australia. Find out more about this significant year in our 2023 Annual Report

As the ORCID Consortium Lead in Australia, we provide a national service to support ORCID adoption at member institutions. Benefits of Consortium membership include access to premium ORCID membership, reduced membership fees and the opportunity to be part of a national community with localised support and events. ORCID identifiers help members to automate how research outputs are reported, and they strengthen links between researchers and their outputs. The ORCID Consortium licensing that AAF manages on behalf of its members, has resulted in significant savings of over $5.9 million to members between 2016-2024. 
 
Through 2023 and 2024, we have been working with the community on the development of a National Persistent Identifier Strategy and Roadmap. This is an opportunity to strengthen Australia’s digital information ecosystem with a national approach to tracking research impact and supporting research integrity and innovation. Learn more in the 2023 ORCID Year in Review. 
 
We have also released our Strategic Plan 2024-2027 in which we outline our goal to provide secure access to high-value digital resources and infrastructure, which is available to view here.
 
Looking forward to 2025, we see a national research system which is increasingly connected, and one in which seamless trust and identity services remove silos, opens access to research knowledge, and helps Australian researchers and users of research infrastructure – from health services to citizen scientists – build the future. 
 
We would like to thank you and our members, partners and the community for your ongoing support.