Research & Scholarship for Service Providers


Browse a list of all current R&S SPs and IdPs


Is my service eligible for the Research & Scholarship (R&S) Category? The authoritative answer is in the Research & Scholarship (R&S) Category document. You can guage a quick answer, though, by browsing the official list of R&S SPs. There you will find:


Apply for Research & Scholarship now!


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

  1. Review Requirements for R&S Service Providers, below.
  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 us at help@incommon.org.

Prospective R&S SPs should consider the deployment implications of R&S.

Requirements for R&S Service Providers


Review the R&S Entity Category specification


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 are operated for the purpose of supporting research and scholarship interaction, collaboration or management, at least in part.

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

InCommon-certified R&S Service Providers must also meet the following privacy requirements, as do all InCommon Service Providers:

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.