Network "URAN": losses and gains

April 21, 2016 ninth general meeting of the Association of Users of Ukrainian Research and Academic Network "URAN" was held in the "KPI", which summed up its activity for the past three years and the plans for the near future. Unfortunately, the war in eastern Ukraine prevented the normal course of events, when the General Meetings were held annually.

Today there are more than 80 scientific, educational and cultural institutions from all regions of Ukraine in the Association. Today, the high-speed fibre optic infrastructure of "URAN" is connecting about half of all Ukrainian universities, which has about two-thirds of all students of the country.

Last years were difficult for network 'URAN', as for our entire country. As a result of Russian aggression large urban fiber network in three cities - Simferopol, Sevastopol, Donetsk, generally about 20 connection points have been lost. Today the network "URAN" operates in 12 cities of Ukraine and has 190 connection points in teaching university buildings, dormitories, research institutes, hospitals, public authorities, etc.

Given the fact that the network "URAN" is a national network and the representative of Ukraine in the pan-European research and education network GEANT, it provides an additional opportunity for scientists from Ukraine to participate in joint EU IT projects.

In 2014 the Association "URAN" introduced a new service - the federation of identity of electronic accounts for Science and Education "IEASE" based on the service eduGAIN, provided by GEANT. The main goal of IEASE is to facilitate access to distributed electronic resources of the federation members. Authentication and authorization infrastructure IEASE allows the user of the organization-member of Federation receive services using only account in their establishment and move from one information system to another without re-authentication: Users simply enter username / password only once to one of the systems and they will have access to all others.

Since July 2015, URAN with scientific and educational networks of Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan have involved in the project of the EU Eastern Partnership Connect (EaPConnect), aimed at the development of electronic infrastructure in these countries. The preparatory phase is currently completed, and participants move to the implementation phase and operation of this five-year project.

In late 2015 Association "URAN" in cooperation with NGO "ELibUkr", National Vernadsky Library of Ukraine and Maksimovich scientific library of the Shevchenko KNU set up a consortium e-VERUM. Its main aim is to improve the provision of electronic information resources to university and research institutions in Ukraine, raise the productivity and efficiency of scientists, promote increase in the number of publications in leading scientific journals, improve Ukrainian science in the international rankings.

The largest project currently being conducted by a consortium of e-VERUM, is preferential subscription on scientometric database Thomson Reuters Web of Science (TORNADO). Access to bibliographic data of scientific articles from reputable periodicals, books and conference proceedings, with the stating the actual citation of these materials allows the user to receive information instantly on the relevance of the work and its impact on the scientific community. 80 scientific and educational institutions in the country and 16 agencies have used the advantage of test access; a company Thomson Reuters provides access to the property free for those, who were evacuated from the occupied territories of Donbass.

Since May 2016 Association "URAN" has expanded service eduroam, which allows users of scientific and educational institutions receive worldwide Internet access through any Wi-Fi network connected to eduroam, using their normal username / password in your "home" institution. This means that all institutions, connected to eduroam, mutually trust one another: if the user has a valid account in one of the institutions, he will be allowed to access the network in all other institutions.

The user gets Internet access simply by activating their mobile device (laptop, tablet, smartphone) with Wi-Fi adapter that will automatically connect to eduroam, authenticate and authorize network access. Eduroam hotspots can be found around the world: their total number reached nearly 20,000, including in Europe - 15 thousand.

Eduroam service is provided by national research and educational network in each country, respectively, in Ukraine - URAN.

The developing of Ukrainian eduroam infrastructure with active participation of each university will allow the scientific and educational community works more closely and provide it a comfortable access to the Internet in the European and global space.