News

Academic Cloud to Be Available at All Higher Education Institutions in Schleswig-Holstein

The nine public higher education institutions in Schleswig-Holstein have decided to use the GWDG (Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen) Academic Cloud Basic offering, along with the Chat AI, Projects, and CoCalc services, until at least the end of the year.

This gives students, lecturers, and researchers at all participating institutions access to a shared digital environment for scientific collaboration, teaching, and research.

Simplified Login Through MFA Forwarding

Federated login to Academic Cloud services has been simplified. Going forward, all you need to log in is multi-factor authentication (MFA) at your home institution. An additional MFA prompt from the Academic Cloud is no longer required.

Previously, users often had to go through two MFA checks during federated login: first at their home institution and then again within the Academic Cloud. This sometimes led to confusion and added effort, especially when different MFA methods were used.

Electronic Lab Notebook eLabFTW Coming Soon to the Academic Cloud

We are pleased to announce that eLabFTW will soon be available as another electronic lab notebook (ELN) service within the Academic Cloud.

eLabFTW is provided as part of the eLabFTW@FDM-NDS project and is hosted on servers operated by the Technical University of Braunschweig.

This open-source application enables structured digital documentation of research experiments and resources, facilitates collaboration, and improves the discoverability, traceability, and reproducibility of research results. In contrast to domain-specific electronic lab notebooks (such as Chemotion ELN), eLabFTW is a generic ELN and can therefore be used across a wide range of scientific disciplines.

Academic Cloud News Delivered Straight to Your Inbox

Our newsletter is back. Going forward, we would like to keep you informed more regularly about news, new features, changes to our services, and other topics related to the Academic Cloud.

If you do not want to miss important updates, you can easily subscribe to our newsletter. Simply send an email to:

Additional Information regarding Academic Cloud

Thank you very much for your numerous responses to our message dated December 4, 2025. Apparently, the newsletter raised some questions. We are very pleased to have received so much feedback and would like to take this opportunity to try to clarify some of the most frequently asked questions.

1. Several questions concerned the AI services of the Academic Cloud, including ChatAI as well as other offerings such as Voice AI, Image AI, CoCo AI, and the upcoming Protein AI service.
   These services were not mentioned in the newsletter because they are not part of the funding secured by the state of Lower Saxony. The AI services are funded through the “AI Service Center for Sensitive and Critical Infrastructures” (KISSKI) project and are therefore secured until June 30, 2026. Discussions are currently underway regarding how these services will continue thereafter.

2. There were also questions about how funding in Lower Saxony relates to the new pricing model for the Academic Cloud.
   The Academic Cloud is intended to be a permanent fixture in the academic university landscape in the long term. For a long time, the Academic Cloud was financed by state funds from the state of Lower Saxony. A pricing model was developed in order to be able to offer the Academic Cloud in the long term and also outside Lower Saxony. Information on this can be found in DFN-Mitteilungen 108 (12/25) ¹. The announcement dated December 4 was intended to inform that, regardless of the new pricing model, the Academic Cloud will continue to be financed by state funds for all universities in Lower Saxony for another year, i.e., until the end of 2026, to the extent of the services mentioned.

3. The question was asked whether the Academic Cloud will cease to exist after 2026.
   The Academic Cloud will continue to exist. Independently of this, work is underway in the state of Lower Saxony to establish long-term state-wide funding. In particular, we are striving for the sustainable provision and use of all services located in the Academic Cloud.

4. Further feedback related to services that were not mentioned in the newsletter.
   Central funding for the services mentioned in the last newsletter article (eduVote, Events, Sync&Share (owncloud/Nextcloud including Groupware and Onlyoffice), GitLab, Hub, Jupyter, Meet (BigBlueButton), Projects (OpenProject), Stack (goemaxima), Survey (LimeSurvey), Whiteboard (Collaboard), Pad, URL Shortener, QR Code Generator, Filesender, Mastodon) was obtained for all universities in Lower Saxony in 2026. In addition, the research data services GRO.data and GRO.plan, ePIC, and the services of the Technical University of Braunschweig, elabFTW and Chemotion, will continue to be available to universities in Lower Saxony free of charge. If any requirements to access futher Academic Cloud services exist, all universities can contact anfrage[at]academiccloud.de directly.

5. What about ShareLaTeX/Overleaf?
   Due to a sudden change in Overleaf’s pricing policy, we will no longer be able to offer the ShareLaTeX service to the same extent as before. As always in such cases, we are working to find a solution and are currently implementing CoCalc as a direct and more widely usable alternative to Overleaf/ShareLaTeX. The upcoming GWDG newsletter ² will describe the service and its interface in detail, and we will publish instructions on how to migrate from ShareLaTeX to CoCalc yourself. In addition, we would like to point out that, in addition to the newsletter ³, we always display the current status of all services transparently on the Academic Cloud website with notes such as “Coming soon,” “Test phase,” “New service,” or “License expiration.” There, you can find out about the current status of the various offerings at any time. Services provided as part of other projects include information on their respective pages under “Further information” regarding the guaranteed runtime.

6. The question was also raised as to why the information was only sent to the mailing list and not to all users.
   We strive for communication that is as open, transparent, and broad as possible. That is why the text was also published on the Academic Cloud website as a news article and as a message on our page for operational announcements at status.gwdg.de. In addition, we regularly post updates on the current status of the Academic Cloud and its services in our publicly accessible and long-term GWDG news.

Academic Cloud Operations Secured for Another Year in Lower Saxony

We are very pleased to announce that the continued operation of the Academic Cloud for Lower Saxony has been secured for another year.
This means that the Academic Cloud will remain fully available to all users at participating universities in Lower Saxony.

The following services will continue to be centrally funded and provided:

Academic Cloud Newsletter

We have now set up a newsletter to inform you about developments, new offers and events relating to the Academic Cloud. You will receive new information and announcements - such as technical changes, pilot services or events - conveniently by email. You can subscribe to the newsletter here: news-subscribe[at]academiccloud.de