The CARSI system, praised by teachers and students of universities as "a must-have for scientific research at home, an artifact of resource access", has nearly 400 universities new joint in a month. The total number of universities reached 502, as of March 26, creating another epidemic "China Speed" record. The rapid growth of the number highlights the important value of CARSI connecting with global academic resources and helping universities during the COVID-19 epidemic.
As part of the national next-generation Internet demonstration project, CARSI, (the abbreviation of CERNET Authentication and Resource Sharing Infrastructure) is organized and managed by the CERNET Network Center and initiated and provided by the Peking University Computing Center. CARSI provide services of federal certification and global academic information resource sharing for universities and research institutes that have established a unified identity certification.
CARSI's federal certification service has built a safe and credible identity certification service platform, which has completely changed the limitation of traditional universities and scientific research institutions that personnel can only access global academic information resources through the IP address of their unit. CARSI has been very successful in reducing the constraints of VPNs on teaching and scientific research work during the epidemic.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, in order to fully support the scientific research of universities and colleges, under the unified deployment of the CERNET network center, Peking University and other undertaking units have accelerated the coverage of CARSI resources and simplified the application process for service providers. CERNET company actively leverages its market resource advantages in promoting the selection and introduction of service providers, with targets including overseas database book resources, domestic database book resources, and other various scientific research and academic-related resource service providers.
On March 24, the OSA publishing database of the Optical Society of America and the domestic financial database Ress Data completed technical debugging and officially launched online, marking the 19th and 20th database service provider of CARSI services, and bringing more than 20 kinds of optical professional journals and massive financial datasets.
So far, CARSI has access to 21 service providers, involving more than 100 resource products, 20 well-known database service providers at home and abroad, covering more than 160,000 journals, more than 10,000 experimental videos, and nearly 500,000 e-books and teaching materials and over 1 billion financial datapoints.
Rich academic resources and user-friendly design lead to a quick recognition of CARSI by the majority of universities. As of March 26, CARSI access to colleges and universities has increased to 502, of which 347 colleges have been online, and another 155 colleges and universities are under deployment. The number of CARSI certifications per day is also rising, and currently exceeds 265,000.
Professor Chen Qinfeng, Director of the Platform and Data Center of Zhejiang University Library, said that access to CARSI greatly facilitates the teachers and students of Zhejiang University. They can easily access the resources purchased by the library outside the campus through unified identity authentication. Teachers left remarks and praised the CARSI service, "This is practical and in line with Zhejiang University's pragmatic and realistic style", "Great, no need to log in to VPN!"
In addition to global academic resource sharing, CARSI also provides unlimited opportunities and space for future cross-university interaction. Previously, the systems of various universities were relatively closed, and it was difficult to conduct mutual trust certification and mutual service. Under the alliance mechanism of CARSI, everyone is in a unified alliance system, whether it is the sharing of high-quality resources, or the mutual trust and certification of credits and hours will have a higher feasibility.
Teacher Wang Feng of the University of Science and Technology of China commented: "CARSI can empower universities more in the future. Through alliances with universities and scientific research institutions all over the world, CARSI establishes a connection between people and resources. CARSI push this connection to extremes, and extend it in all directions."
