Research and scholarship activities extend beyond the boundaries of the campus and increasingly so do the applications that support collaboration. Your campus can leverage your federated identity management system to allow faculty and researchers to access participating research collaboration services without manual intervention by your staff.

Certification for the Research and Scholarship (R&S) Category is a straightforward process involving you, your institution, and InCommon:

  1. Ensure that your SP or IdP meets the requirements set forth in the REFEDS Research and Scholarship Entity Category definition and the InCommon Federation Participation Agreement (Section 9, in particular). In brief, you will need to:
    1. For an Identity Provider
      1. As descried in Research and Scholarship IdP Config, make a one-time change to your Identity Provider's attribute release policy to release a user identifier and basic information (name, email, and optionally affiliation) about each faculty member and researcher to R&S certified Service Providers.
    2. For an Service Provider
      1. Ensure the service enhances the research and scholarship activities.
      2. Ensure the service complies with specific technical requirements addressing issues of security and operational maturity.
    3. See InCommon's Research and Scholarship Category page for more information. The application forms linked below make good checklists.
  2. Complete an online application form.
    1. Research and Scholarship Application Form for Identity Providers
    2. Research and Scholarship Application Form for Service Providers

InCommon will review your application and then generate a metadata update for your IdP or SP. Your site administrator then approves the metadata update, and the process is complete!