It's time to move to REFEDS Research and Scholarship category

The InCommon-Only Research and Scholarship (R&S) has been replaced by the REFEDS R&S category. If your identity provider still supports InCommon-only R&S, it is now time to switch support to REFEDS R&S.

All qualifying resources in the R&S category, including those qualifying collaborations spinning up to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, are part of REFEDS R&S. Your IDP must release attributes under the REFEDS R&S category to enable seamless user access to these research collaboration resources.

How do I migrate my IDP from InCommon-only R&S to REFEDS R&S?

How do I remove the InCommon-only R&S entity attribute from my metadata?

Since there is no longer any InCommon-only R&S service providers, The InCommon-only R&S entity attribute and related attribute release configuration effectively does nothing today. For now, besides declaring support for REFEDS R&S, you do not need to do anything. The Incommon Federation will announce a "clean-up" date in the near future to remove the InCommon-only R&S tag from all identity providers registered in InCommon. 

What are the differences between the two R&S categories?

See Comparing REFEDS and InCommon-only R and S categories.

History

The Research and Scholarship (R&S) category was first introduced within the Incommon Federation, available only to InCommon participants. In 2014, with R&E federations around the world coming together to form the global eduGAIN federation, the continued curation of the R&S category moved under the stewardship of REFEDS (the Research and Education FEDerations group) to promote international adoption. REFEDS Research and Scholarship Entity Category was born. All Service Providers (SP) who previously qualified for the InCommon-only R&S category were automatically converted to REFEDS R&S. 

Because identity providers (IDP) needed to take explicit actions to support REFEDS R&S, we couldn't automatically convert IDPs to REFEDS R&S. However, as there is no more InCommon-only R&S SPs, if your IDP still only support InCommon-only R&S, it's time to move to support REFEDS R&S.