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Change in Requirements to Become a Member of the Research & Scholarship Category
A number of changes were made to the R&S application form beginning with v. 21 of that form:
- The human subjects requirement was removed from the R&S definition on Dec 1, 2014
- An accounting of the governance process that led to this change is documented elsewhere
- The InCommon R&S requirements have been aligned with the new REFEDS R&S specification
- See the gap analysis to understand the differences between InCommon R&S and the new REFEDS R&S specification
- Except for the human subjects requirement, the new R&S requirements (as documented on the new R&S info page for SPs) are backwards compatible with the previous set of R&S requirements. Thus every R&S SP that submits the new application form will receive two R&S entity attribute values in metadata, one denoting InCommon R&S and another signifying compliance with the REFEDS R&S specification. At this point, the legacy InCommon R&S entity attribute value is for backwards compatibility only, so that IdPs continue to release attributes to the same set of R&S SPs.
Note to SP Owners
Your SP will experience no operational changes as a result of submitting the new R&S application form. When you are ready to interoperate with global R&S IdPs, let us know (admin@incommon.org) and we will make arrangements to export your SP’s metadata to eduGAIN. If you decide not to interoperate with global R&S IdPs at this time, that’s fine, it's your choice.
Note to IdP Operators
In the short term, the goal is for all InCommon R&S SPs to have a multivalued entity attribute in metadata, that is, each SP will satisfy the requirements of both InCommon R&S and REFEDS R&S (which is possible since the gap between the two specifications is small). Once all R&S SPs have a multivalued entity attribute in metadata, all InCommon R&S IdPs will be encouraged to migrate their configurations to the REFEDS R&S entity attribute, that is, to release the R&S attribute bundle to all R&S SPs, globally.