Research & Scholarship Category FAQ for Identity Providers
Which services are eligible for the Research & Scholarship category?
Candidates for the R&S category include Service Providers that support research and scholarship as an essential component. For example, a service providing tools for both multi-institutional research collaboration and instruction is eligible as a candidate for the R&S category.
InCommon reviews all applications from potential R&S Service Providers. The InCommon Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) and the InCommon Steering Committee also review and approve the requests. Visit the Federation Info pages for a complete list of all R&S SPs.
Which attributes are released as part of the Research & Scholarship category?
The R&S category defines the following attribute bundle:
- personal identifiers: e-mail address, person name,
eduPersonPrincipalName - pseudonymous identifier:
eduPersonTargetedID - affiliation:
eduPersonScopedAffiliation
where e-mail address refers to the mail attribute and person name refers to displayName and optionally givenName and surName.
InCommon IdPs are strongly encouraged to release some subset of this attribute bundle to R&S category SPs. See the R&S Category Attributes section of the main R&S page for more details.
Do all R&S SPs require all attributes in the bundle?
InCommon highly recommends that SPs take a minimalist approach to attributes, only requesting those attributes that they absolutely need. IdPs are encouraged to implement a default policy that releases the R&S attributes to SPs in the R&S category. This requires a one-time change to the IdP's deployment configuration. If you are interested, we've provided more-detailed implementation guidance for IdPs on this wiki. As a side note, a number of IdPs intend to release these attributes to all SPs by default.
Does the release of these attributes violate FERPA or other compliance requirements?
We do not believe so. We have worked with university counsels, registrars, and associate provosts to review these and found no issues to date. We have summarized our belief on the wiki. We encourage campuses to reach out and talk to someone that has implemented R&S for further information.
Where can I find complete information on the Research & Scholarship program?
There is detailed information on the Research and Scholarship Category elsewhere in this wiki.