Research & Scholarship Category
InCommon is offering offers an easier easy method for participants to provide support collaborative services for researchers and scholars via their federated identities by reducing centralizing the policy interpretation, inter-institutional agreements, and system configuration needed for those such services. This method 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 researchers 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 Research & Scholarship ( 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 the R&S category SPs with a one-time addition to their default attribute release policies, a simpler and more scalable approach than negotiating such release bilaterally with every R&S service provider.
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| title | The Research & Scholarship Value Proposition |
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- 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
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Background
A growing number of Many Service Providers (SPs) supporting collaborative research and scholarship activities are joining InCommonhave 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 we anticipate in the futurecan 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.
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