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.
For example, a small number of R&S SPs are known to filter IdP metadata such that R&S IdPs are the only IdPs exposed on the SP's discovery interface. Such an SP is dependent upon the R&S entity attribute in IdP metadata.
| If your SP deployment depends on the R&S entity attribute in IdP metadata, please read on. Otherwise there is nothing further you need to do. |
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.
| If an SP configuration depends on the R&S entity attribute in IdP metadata, it SHOULD recognize both R&S tags independently but it MUST NOT rely on the multivalued entity attribute in any way. Eventually every R&S IdP will have a single-valued R&S entity attribute in metadata. A timeline for doing so has not yet been determined. |
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.