Migrating an SP to the Global Research and Scholarship Category

This topic is for owners of existing Research & Scholarship (R&S) SPs.

R&S IdPs in the InCommon Federation are currently in the process of migrating to global R&S. Likewise new R&S IdPs will be encouraged to support global R&S as well. More importantly, InCommon will soon begin importing the metadata of R&S IdPs from other federations. In anticipation of these events, existing R&S SP owners should begin to develop a migration strategy for global R&S.

Since all R&S SPs in the InCommon Federation now meet the requirements of the international REFEDS Research & Scholarship Entity Category specification, R&S SPs have a multivalued R&S entity attribute in InCommon metadata. In that sense, all R&S SPs have successfully migrated to global R&S. However, if an R&S SP deployment depends on the R&S entity attribute in IdP metadata, then additional migration steps may be required since the entity attributes in IdP metadata will change as IdPs declare their support for global R&S.

For example, a small number of R&S SP deployments are known to filter IdP metadata such that R&S IdPs are the only IdPs exposed on the SP's discovery interface. Such an SP is dependent upon the R&S entity attribute in IdP metadata.

An SP deployment that depends on the R&S entity attribute in IdP metadata almost certainly recognizes the legacy incommon.org R&S entity attribute value:

http://id.incommon.org/category/research-and-scholarship

Such an SP may also want to recognize the refeds.org R&S entity attribute value

http://refeds.org/category/research-and-scholarship

since IdPs that support global R&S will carry the latter in their metadata. Indeed, R&S IdPs from other federations will carry the refeds.org R&S tag exclusively.