Research and scholarship activities extend beyond the boundaries of the campus and, increasingly, so do the applications that support collaboration. Your campus can take advantage of your federated identity management system to allow faculty and researchers to immediately access participating collaboration services without going through a potentially long process involving IT staff.
It works like this. InCommon has created a category (Research & Scholarship) that services join (after going through a simple vetting process). You release a minimal set of information (attributes) to this entire category by making a one-time policy change (to your attribute release policy). As a result, any faculty member and researcher on your campus can access any Research & Scholarship service by signing in with campus credentials, without any intervention from IT.
The R&S category requires releasing very basic information about the faculty member or researcher: name, email address, affiliation (student, employee, faculty, staff, etc.), and an opaque identifier that is private and can be persistent, which allows for seamless movement among various collaboration services hosted at different locations. None of this information is stored by the service, but is used by the services to authorize access.
Participating in the Research & Scholarship Category allows you to take advantage of the investment you have made in federated identity management and provide a real service and convenience to your faculty and researchers. You will also save time and resources by removing an additional burden from your IT staff members.