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InCommon is implementing a simplified and scalable approach for providing its member institutions to provide services that support Research research and Scholarship activities at its member institutions by implementing scholarship activities. The approach is to implement a Research and Scholarship (R&S) category for Service Providers.service providers that is designed to facilitate attribute release decisions by identity providers
A growing number of Service Providers (SPs) supporting collaborative Research and Scholarship activities are joining InCommon. As is the standard practice in the Higher Education/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 future. 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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