Migrating an SP to the Global Research and Scholarship Category
This topic is for owners of existing Research & Scholarship (R&S) SPs.
Existing R&S IdPs in the InCommon Federation are currently in the process of migrating to global R&S. 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 to global R&S.
All R&S SPs in the InCommon Federation now meet the requirements of the international REFEDS Research & Scholarship Entity Category specification and therefore all 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 depends on the R&S entity attribute in IdP metadata, then additional migration steps are required since the entity attributes in IdP metadata will change as IdPs declare their support for global R&S.
An SP configuration 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 necessarily carry the latter in their metadata. Indeed, R&S IdPs from other federations will carry the refeds.org R&S tag exclusively.
Today an InCommon IdP that supports global R&S (i.e., releases attributes to ALL R&S SPs) has a multivalued R&S entity attribute in its metadata. Eventually this multivalued R&S entity attribute will be removed.
An SP configuration MUST NOT rely on the multivalued R&S entity attribute in IdP metadata
In other words, if an SP is currently configured to recognize the incommon.org R&S tag in IdP metadata, it should be reconfigured to recognize the refeds.org R&S tag as well but it must not rely on the multivalued R&S entity attribute in IdP metadata.