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1) The immediate and most tangible benefit is that researchers and scholars on campuses that support R&S may seamlessly access a growing list of R&S services without friction or administrator involvement. In other words, the end result may be characterized as: Federation for Research and Scholarship that Just Works. 2) Many potential R&S services choose not to federate because IdP support for R&S across our campuses is spotty and uneven. We expect a threshold number of campuses to cause a "Cambrian Explosion" of valuable R&S services to appear in the InCommon Federation, which will spur collaboration and research in the US. 3) Continuing our participatory role in the global R&E community, InCommon has introduced an international version of the Research & Scholarship Service Category to the REFEDS community, which requires broad support from InCommon participants to be successful. |
Background
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 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 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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