Research and Scholarship for SPs

Research & Scholarship for Service Providers

By now you’ve probably heard about the Research & Scholarship (R&S) Category and naturally your first question is: Is my service eligible for R&S? The best way to gauge an answer to that question is to browse the official list of R&S SPs. There you will find:

• institutional wikis (including the Internet2 Spaces wiki)
• collaboration tools for faculty, staff, and researchers
• data sharing and management tools
• credential translation and management tools
• collaboration services for NSF-funded research projects
• collaboration services for international e-science communities
• learning platforms for research and education
• cloud computing and storage services for scientists
• network monitoring and analysis tools

If your service overlaps with the above list of Research & Scholarship services, we encourage you to apply for R&S. Here’s a sequence of steps that will get you there:

1. Browse the official list of R&S SPs and IdPs
2. Review the [R&S Application Form]
3. Read the authoritative Research & Scholarship Entity Category specification
4. Read the InCommon Participation Agreement, especially section 9 of that document, which deals with privacy
5. Review the Deployment Considerations for R&S document
6. Review your entity info page for consistency, clarity, and completeness
7. Talk to your Site Administrator about becoming a Delegated Administrator of your service metadata
8. Update your metadata (or have your metadata updated) as needed
9. Submit the [R&S Application Form]

If you have questions about R&S, contact InCommon Admin at admin@incommon.org

Requirements for R&S Service Providers

By definition, a Research & Scholarship service enhances the research and scholarship activities of some subset of the InCommon community. See the REFEDS specification of the Research & Scholarship Entity Category for a precise definition:

Candidates for the Research and Scholarship (R&S) Category are Service Providers that support research and scholarship interaction, collaboration or management as an essential component.

R&S Service Providers must meet the following technical requirements:

• Service metadata must be submitted to InCommon and published in a human-readable format on the InCommon public web site.
• The Service Provider refreshes and verifies metadata at least daily.
• The Service Provider is a production SAML deployment that supports the SAML V2.0 HTTP-POST binding (one of numerous SAML V2.0 endpoints in metadata).
• The Service Provider provides both an MDUI DisplayName and an MDUI InformationURL, two User Interface Elements in metadata.
• The Service Provider provides both Technical and Administrative contacts in metadata.
• The Service Provider provides requested attributes in metadata. (It is highly RECOMMENDED that the requested attributes in metadata be a subset of the R&S attribute bundle, otherwise a bilateral agreement with each IdP may be required.)

R&S Service Providers must also meet the following privacy requirements:

• The Service Provider requests only those attributes required to operate the service.
• The Service Provider will not use attributes for purposes that fall outside of the service definition.

R&S Service Providers must resolve issues of non-compliance within a reasonable period of time from when they become aware of the issue. Failure to do so may result in revocation of their membership in the R&S category.