Brunel University has become the 100th member of the UK Access Management Federation academic access system, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has revealed.

The institution joins 62 universities and colleges and 37 other bodies that have already joined up to the new access management system, which is being funded by JISC.

Nicole Harris, senior services manager at JISC, said: “There is now a significant enthusiasm for federated access within the UK and the rapidly increasing membership of the federation sends a clear message about the importance of an open standard approach for our institutions and service providers within our community.”

Two thirds of those who have signed up so far are universities or colleges, with the rest a mixture of local authorities, Regional Broadband Consortia and online publishers.

Ed Zedlewski, CTO and deputy CEO at Eduserv, which supplies Athens and the OpenAthens access systems, said the numbers would be boosted by more than 50 educational institutions that had signed up through OpenAthens, Eduserv’s alternative to the Federation launched in March, including the Royal College of Music and Liverpool John Moores University.

Eduserv launched a new tool, OpenAthens, in March to offer institutions managed access to the Federation. Zedlewski said using the system would allow institutions “secure access to Shibboleth-protected, UK Access Management Federation resources while continuing to enjoy the reliability, user-friendliness and administrator support of the current Athens service.”

His comments follow research commissioned by Eduserv, covered in September’s IWR, which found that only 30% of higher and further education institutions have the time, technical resources and budget to join the Federation. But JISC is happy with the take up.

The new access management infrastructure is based on open standard Shibboleth technology and operated by JANET(UK) on behalf of JISC and Becta.