While some e-infrastructures included accounting in their design and operations from the start, others are now being asked or required to add accounting support to their existing systems. Typically accounting forms part of a relationship between the infrastructure and some other organisation – perhaps a funder, host or customer – rather than the infrastructure’s relationship with its individual users. These organisations may be interested in usage statistics across particular categories: for example by subject, by time, by project or by origin. It might be assumed that infrastructures already have enough data to generate these statistics retrospectively, as a result of their authentication, authorisation and security activities. However a closer examination indicates that these may not, in fact, be sufficient and that specific data, processes and agreements may be needed to support reliable accounting.
This paper uses accounting infrastructures’ experience to examine some of the situations where accounting may be required and the extent to which existing data may, or may not, support it. It then identifies some of the new issues that accounting requirements are likely to raise, and suggests questions for infrastructures that do not currently provide accounting to consider either when, or before, they are asked about it.
