Release notes

RAS-CRDC Integration Phase 1 completed

The Researcher Auth Service (RAS), sponsored by The Office of Data Science Strategy, is a service provided by NIH's Center for Information Technology (CIT) to facilitate access to NIH’s open and controlled data assets and repositories in a consistent and user-friendly manner. 

The RAS initiative is advancing data infrastructure and ecosystem goals defined in the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science. RAS has adopted the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) standards for integration of researcher-focused applications and data repositories over the OIDC platform.

The goal for this effort is to coordinate all cloud stacks and use RAS identically across systems. The NCI CRDC (Cancer Research Data Commons) stack was chosen for the pilot phase to create a phased approach that should achieve the larger goals of federated data access using GA4GH Passports, with a focus on how this fits in with NIH data in general.

Phase 1 is now completed introducing a change to the login flow when using eRA Commons:

• When choosing login with eRA Commons on the CGC, you will now be redirected to the NIH RAS login screen instead of iTrust. 

• Other than the login flow change, user experience on the CGC remains the same.

Recently published apps

• GATK Broad Best Practice Variant Calling From uBAM - This workflow presents two different BROAD Best Practice workflows incorporated into one - BAM processing and variant calling.

• Functional Equivalence WGS - This workflow processes WGS data according to the functional equivalence standard.