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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 unless a local faculty member submits a specific request and and a policy exception is granted. without local review of the SP's purpose, governing policy, and operational practices.
This approach is simply not scalable ; it just plain will not work in an environment that will likely have to the thousands of campus IdPs and thousands of SPs in this category. This 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 unless a scalable solution is developed.
InCommon is implementing a simplified and scalable approach to this problem through the specification of a "Research and Scholarship (R&S)" category for SPs. All InCommon SPs have already agreed to a set of practices governing how they manage and use personal attributes. To qualify for inclusion in the R&S category, SPs comply with an additional set of criteria that are designed to facilitate IdP policy decisions to release a controlled set of low-risk attributes the to R&S SPs without per-SP local review. InCommon provides metadata and technology tools to further facilitate automatic, but controlled, release of attributes to the R&S SPs, as well as aiding user support.
This Research and Scholarship (R&S) Category Pilot will include a small number of SPs and IdPs to test this approach, recommending modifications to the specifications described here, as appropriate. The following are the participants in this pilot:
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