WISE Baseline AUP

WISE Baseline AUP (version 1) is available at:

Acceptable use policy (AUP) and terms and conditions are necessary instruments in the regulation of infrastructure access. They bind the user to the ‘purpose’ for which the services and resources they use have been provided. Yet, like with privacy notices, the reader is rather inclined to click through and proceed with the actual task at hand. Thus, to reduce the burden on the user and increase the likelihood that they will read the AUP, the number of times a user is presented with such notices must be kept to a minimum, preferably just a single time. Yet the notice should cover as much of the user’s potential use of the infrastructure as possible: the more services and resources deem an AUP as sufficient for their policy purposes, the better it will be. This will allow users to use resources from multiple service and resource providers without the need to confirm acceptance of additional AUPs.

The aim of the WISE Baseline AUP is to

• provide a common baseline set of criteria for acceptable use and terms and conditions for the professional use of IT infrastructures for research globally – and thereby ease the trust of users across infrastructures: services within an infrastructure have a common framework describing the behaviour of users coming from multiple communities;
• facilitate a presentation format that allows necessary privacy notices (in Europe for GDPR compliance) to be presented at the same time and remain easily available thereafter;
• support services with varying levels of support and quality guarantees;
• provide for augmentation of the baseline AUP with community and infrastructure-specific terms and conditions
• be applicable to both ‘community-first’ and ‘user-first’ AAI membership management services.
  In the conventional ‘community-first’ model, the AUP is shown to the user when registering with their research community. The model here referred to as ‘user-first’ presumes that the user first enrols in a generic, potentially multi-tenancy, membership management service (MMS), and within that service petitions membership to one or more of the research communities hosted within the MMS.