Introducing *Unity – A Facebook-like Collaborative Cloud for Universities and Research Institutions

November 10, 2015 – Where do academics turn to in social media to interact for the purposes of research collaboration? Academic social networks like Digital Commons, Academia.edu, and Researchgate.net have been around for some time. All attempt to create Facebook-like online environments. More show and tell statements than collaborative in focus. That’s where *Unity, a global research platform for universities and research institutions differs. Branded “the cloud where universities work together,” *Unity invites users to form groups, share and collaborate.

*Unity started as an enterprise service provider for individual universities. But in its newest iteration it has become a full-blown social networking collaborative platform that promises to be an open ecosystem of apps linking the worlds of academia and research at no cost. The platform includes;

• Secure invitations: users can now invite anyone, anywhere to collaborate without compromising on security
• Institutional context: over 18,000 tenancies have been created so far for nearly 20,000 leading universities and research organizations so that members have easy access to other users as well as resources at their own institution
• Simple sign up: Any invitee can join a collaboration with just a couple of clicks
• Integration with institutional single sign-on systems at thousands of universities and research institutions across the world.

*Unity is free to academics and researchers. Institutions can take charge of their tenancy by bearing the costs incurred by their users. States William Cullerne Brown, one of *Unity’s founders, “The reach is global, the servers are in Europe and we comply with the data protection rules of the many access management federations to which we belong.”

*Unity runs on software developed by the Apereo Foundation’s Open Academic Environment Project. Aperio is a not-for-profit that promotes open source software within higher education. Other partners include Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, the Georgia Institute of Technology and Marist College in the United States, the ESUP-Portail consortium of 80 universities in France, the Independent Schools Victoria (ISV) consortium of 200 schools in Australia, And *Research, a source of intelligence for academia with 600 global institutions and over 100,000 active users.

To sign up go to www.unity.ac.