This article was originally posted by Gerben Venekamp in SURF’s Innovation Blog
What are Federations and why does research need them?
Today, research for a number of disciplines is conducted more in collaborations and less in small individual projects. The European Commission stimulates this by encouraging collaborations between research institutes across Europe. Under this encouragement, large collaborations for research have been formed in the past. Within these collaborations, making use of each other services were done on a case by case situation. It usually came down to a user obtaining the necessary credentials for the services she needed. Although this approach is cumbersome, the number of people were quite small, making this approach acceptable.
