Research & Scholarship Category Identity Providers Reach 100 Mark
With the addition of the Weill Cornell Medical College, InCommon now has 100 identity providers supporting the Research & Scholarship (R&S) Category. An Identity Provider that supports R&S releases a minimal set of attributes to all services in the category. Today there are 27 such services. Visit our web site for a complete list of participating identity providers and service providers: https://incommon.org/federation/info/all-sp-categories.html
Research and scholarship activities in higher ed extend beyond the boundaries of the campus and increasingly so do the applications that support collaboration. By making a one-time change to its IdP’s attribute release policy, a campus can leverage federated identity management to allow faculty and researchers to instantly access participating research collaboration services.
To participate, an identity provider configures its attribute release policy to release basic information to the entire R&S category, including person name and email address plus a user identifier that allows for seamless access across various collaboration services hosted at different locations. For details, see: https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/x/aAbvAQ
Benefits include:
- Convenience for faculty and researchers: they instantly access participating services using campus credentials without administrator involvement
- Simplifying 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
- Time and resource savings: once enabled, there is no additional involvement of IT staff to provision new R&S services
Service providers can apply for R&S designation by completing a simple form at https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/x/Sxb5AQ. An R&S service enhances the research and scholarship activities of some subset of the InCommon community and adheres to a few basic technical requirements.
By adopting R&S, an identity provider greatly simplifies the lives of researchers by providing a minimal set of attributes to an entire category of service providers. Virtual organizations and collaborative services no longer need to negotiate with every identity provider.