InCommon has partnered with its peer R&E federations worldwide to create the Research and Scholarship Entity Category (R&S), a simple and scalable way for Identity Providers to release minimal amounts of required personal data to Service Providers serving the Research and Scholarship Community. Institutions that certify their IdP for R&S realize the following:
A list of all current R&S IdPs and SPs is available for your perusal.
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The Research & Scholarship (R&S) Category defines specific criteria for SPs that are designed to facilitate IdP policy decisions to release a controlled set of low-risk attributes to them without local review for each SP. InCommon also provides metadata and technology tools to further facilitate automatic, but controlled, release of attributes to the R&S SPs, as well as aiding user support.
IdPs leverage this to simplify the management of their Attribute Release Policies by taking advantage of the R&S Category. With a one-time addition to their default release policies they can specify a set of attributes to release to all SPs that are in the R&S Category. This addition then applies to SPs that are added to the category in the future, without the IDP administrator having to make any changes. IdPs also assert their support for R&S in federation metadata, allowing R&S-certified SPs to enhance the user experience of those IdPs' researchers.
Certifying your IdP or SP for R&S is easy, although SPs do require a review period to verify compliance with the requirements. See How to Apply for the Research and Scholarship (R&S) Entity Category for details. For more information specific to IdPs and SPs, see: