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:

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.