Indiana University is again leading the way to better health care by enabling scientists to share research more rapidly and securely over the Internet.

The Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI), of which IU is a founding member, recently became the first health care research institute to be named to the InCommon Federation’s Research & Scholarship (R&S) category.

This designation simplifies collaboration by reducing the red tape scientists must wade through to securely share their research findings. Now via the Indiana CTSI HUB website, scientists will be able to quickly and securely share life sciences research with other scientists online, paving the way for health care breakthroughs and cures.

Since its 2008 founding, the Indiana CTSI has been a national leader in fostering scientific collaboration. It was the first institution supported by the Clinical and Translational Sciences Awards (CTSA) to advance federated logins. The CTSA program is funded by the National Institutes of Health through its National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. Federated logins let researchers quickly and securely access resources with their own university credentials.

The Indiana CTSI was also the first institution of any kind to support collaboration for all the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) institutions, a consortium of the top-tier research universities of the Big Ten Conference and the University of Chicago.

The Indiana CTSI’s new R&S designation, coupled with its use of federated logins, boosts its standing as a major player in the discovery of new therapies for better health.

“The web can support collaborations, but without identity management capabilities like this that make them rapid and secure, their usefulness for medical research has been limited,” said Bill Barnett, director of information infrastructures for the Indiana CTSI and director of science community tools for the Pervasive Technology Institute at Indiana University.

“The ability to share information online using existing usernames and passwords has allowed clinicians and scientists from across our partner institutions to collaborate more easily and efficiently,” said Anantha Shekhar, MD, PhD, director of the Indiana CTSI and IU associate dean for translational research. “I’m proud that Indiana CTSI has played a role in proving how research can be accelerated using this new technology.”