Research & Scholarship Category
InCommon offers an easy method for participants to support collaborative services for researchers and scholars via their federated identities by centralizing the policy interpretation, inter-institutional agreements, and system configuration needed for such services. InCommon and its sister R&E federations do that work so that participants need not duplicate it for each collaborative service. This approach categorizes service providers (SPs) that support research and scholarship (R&S) activities to simplify the configuration of identity providers (IdPs); the result is that academics can successfully access R&S SP sites without delay and without contacting their local IdP admin for special configuration to meet their individual needs. The R&S Category applies to service providers that support research and scholarly activities such as virtual organizations and campus-based collaboration services. Participating IdPs agree to release a minimal set of attributes to R&S SPs with a one-time addition to their attribute release policies, a simpler and more scalable approach than negotiating such release bilaterally with every R&S service provider.
| Div | ||
|---|---|---|
| ||
|
Contents
| Table of Contents | ||
|---|---|---|
|
...
| title | The Research & Scholarship Value Proposition |
|---|
has partnered with its peer R&E federations worldwide to create the Research and Scholarship Entity Category (R&S), a simple and scalable way for Identity Providers to release minimal amounts of required personal data to Service Providers serving the Research and Scholarship Community. Institutions that certify their IdP for R&S realize the following:
- Convenience for faculty and researchers: they instantly access participating services using campus credentials without administrator involvement
- Enable collaboration: When a research project adds a service to the category, collaboration across participating campuses is immediate
- Vetted services: InCommon reviews each service application for adherence to the category definition and requirements
- Save time and resources: once enabled, there is no additional involvement of IT staff to provision new R&S services
Background
Many Service Providers (SPs) supporting collaborative research and scholarship activities have joined InCommon and other national R&E federations. As is the standard practice in the higher education and research world, collaboration on these sites involves knowing who the collaborators are: name, email, institutional affiliation. Unfortunately, the default Attribute Release Policies in place at most campus Identity Providers (IdPs) do not share any information with these sites without local review of the SP's purpose, governing policy, and operational practices. This approach is simply not scalable to the thousands of campus IdPs and thousands of SPs supporting research and scholarship that can benefit from federation. It is already a serious problem for the big virtual organizations and research labs; the hoped-for explosion of smaller collaboration sites housed in academic departments will not succeed with federation without a scalable solution.
A list of all current R&S IdPs and SPs is available for your perusal.
Contents
| Table of Contents | ||
|---|---|---|
|
How It Works
The All InCommon SPs are already bound by a set of practices governing how they manage and use personal attributes. InCommon's Research & Scholarship (R&S) Category defines additional set specific criteria for SPs that are designed to facilitate IdP policy decisions to release a controlled set of low-risk attributes to R&S SPs them without local review for each SP. InCommon also provides metadata and technology tools to further facilitate automatic, but controlled, release of attributes to the R&S SPs, as well as aiding user support.
IdPs can leverage this to simplify the management of their Attribute Release Policies by taking advantage of the R&S Category. With a one-time addition to their default release policies they can specify a set of attributes to release to all SPs that are in the R&S Category. This policy would apply addition then applies to SPs that are added to the category in the future, without the IDP administrator having to make any changes.
Candidate Services
Whether an SP operator is commercial or non-commercial is not relevant to eligibility for the IdPs also assert their support for R&S Category, nor are any other aspects of how the service is implemented or operated, beyond the specific requirements noted below. It's all about purpose.
| Info | ||
|---|---|---|
| ||
The three traditional dimensions of the academic endeavor are: research and scholarship, instruction, and service. Candidates for the R&S Category are Service Providers that support research and scholarship as an essential component. For example, a service providing tools for both multi-institutional research collaboration and instruction is eligible as a candidate for the R&S Category. |
InCommon has chosen to introduce service categories in a conservative way, by focusing narrowly on services purposed for research and scholarship, in order to make implementation as straightforward as possible, and limit the range of concerns to be as specific as possible. Other service categories may be defined in the future for other purposesin federation metadata, allowing R&S-certified SPs to enhance the user experience of those IdPs' researchers.
| Anchor | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
...
Certifying your IdP or SP for R&S is easy, although SPs do require a review period to verify compliance with the requirements. See How to Apply for the Research and Scholarship (R&S) Entity Category for details. For more information specific to IdPs and SPs, see: