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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Finally, we would like to apologize once again for the unclear communication and at the same time ask for your understanding that the Academic Cloud is currently undergoing a period of change. Nevertheless, we hope to have provided a long-term perspective on all questions.

We are very grateful for all your questions, as they help us understand which topics and ambiguities are particularly relevant for Academic Cloud users.

Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions you may have. We also welcome any suggestions on how we can improve overall, and in particular in terms of communication.