Migrating to the Global Research & Scholarship Category

This page is for existing R&S IdPs that want to support global Research & Scholarship by releasing attributes to all R&S SPs, including R&S SPs in other federations.

Supporting the REFEDS R&S Entity Category

To support R&S globally, an existing R&S IdP follows this simple 3-step process:

1. Review the authoritative REFEDS Research & Scholarship Entity Category specification
   
   1. The requirements for an R&S IdP have not changed
   2. The requirements for an R&S SP have changed slightly (a gap analysis has been prepared for your convenience)
2. Configure your IdP to release attributes to all R&S SPs globally (see next section)
3. Declare your IdP's ability to support global R&S by submitting a short form
   

Configuring an IdP to Release Attributes Globally

Most of the Research & Scholarship (R&S) IdPs in the InCommon Federation are configured with a policy rule that releases attributes to R&S SPs tagged with the legacy InCommon R&S entity attribute value:

<afp:PolicyRequirementRule xsi:type="saml:AttributeRequesterEntityAttributeExactMatch"
    attributeName="http://macedir.org/entity-category"
    attributeValue="http://id.incommon.org/category/research-and-scholarship"/>

To support R&S globally, an R&S IdP should instead be configured with a policy that releases the R&S Attribute Bundle to all R&S SPs, including R&S SPs in other federations:

<afp:PolicyRequirementRule xsi:type="saml:AttributeRequesterEntityAttributeExactMatch"
    attributeName="http://macedir.org/entity-category"
    attributeValue="http://refeds.org/category/research-and-scholarship"/>
 
<!-- for Shib IdP V3, use type saml:EntityAttributeExactMatch instead -->

For more detailed information about configuring an IdP for R&S, consult the R&S Attribute Bundle Config topic.

To facilitate the migration suggested by the previous examples, all R&S SPs registered by InCommon now have a multivalued R&S entity attribute in metadata.

Important! For both SPs and IdPs, only the refeds.org R&S entity attribute value is exported to eduGAIN:

See the R&S Entity Metadata topic for details about entity attributes in metadata.