In Research Cloud, all things concerning identity and collaboration are based on the SURF Research Access Management Service (SRAM).

In order to start a Workspace or to create a catalog item you have to be a member of an SRAM collaboration.

A collaboration is an ad-hoc group of people who are allowed to work together by sharing resources. As a scientist, you can easily make a collaboration. That way, you can invite other researchers to join your efforts in Research Cloud, and you can then self-organize yourselves to distribute tasks, including administering the collaboration.

Resources that the group can work with come in the form of IT services (e.g.: data or compute services). In order for the members of the collaboration to be able to log in to those services, those services must be coupled first to the collaboration. Administrators of the collaboration can couple the required services. 

Every collaboration in SRAM lives in a so-called organization. The idea is that your institute is that organization. Depending on your institute's policy, however, you may or may not get the rights to create and manage such a collaboration.

For SURF Research Cloud we can create collaborations where SURF is the organization. We can then grant you access to the created collaboration.

We explain here what steps you can take in order to create a collaboration whose organization is SURF. You can directly use the Research Cloud portal to send a request ticket to the Research Cloud helpdesk to create the collaboration you need.

Log in to the Research Cloud portal and select the "Profile" tab:


In the "Request new collaboration" click the "REQUEST" button.

In the dialog that appears, fill in the name of your new collaboration and click "REQUEST":


This will file a ticket to the SURF servicedesk, on your behalf. You will receive a confirmation of the ticket by e-mail.

The helpdesk team will create the collaboration for you. You will receive another e-mail with an invitation to your collaboration.

By accepting the invitation, you will become a member with administrative rights.

Once you are a member of your new collaboration, you will be able to see it in the Research Cloud portal in the "Profile" tab.

In order to view or edit your collaboration, you can access the SRAM service portal.

You can also invite other members to your collaboration, there. An e-mail address is enough to invite somebody.