REFEDS R&S (Research and Scholarship) Entity Category

This entity category has been developed to facilitate access to collaborative tools and services such as wikis, blogs, project and grant management tools which require some personal information about people accessing the service to work effectively. It is not used for access to licensed content such as e-journals.

The specification can be found at https://refeds.org/specifications

We provide page listing which SPs currently assert the R&S category

R&S Category for Service Providers

Pre-requisites

  • You should be familiar with the R&S entity category specification
  • You must ensure the technical requirements for this category are met

You must also demonstrate support of your R&S application from an existing UK federation Higher, Further Education or Research member. This can be done by the provision of an email or letter in support of the application from a UK federation Management Contact (MC) at a Higher Education, Further Education or Research Institute member.

The email or letter must be sent to service@ukfederation.org.uk or UK Federation Operator, Jisc,15 Fetter Lane, London EC4A 1BW and must reference the Service Provider entity it is supporting. It is RECOMMENDED that UK HE /FE or Research Institute Management Contacts who provide such a letter inform their institutional Information Security officer before they do so. The UK federation reserves the right to confirm the provision of support with the Management Contact.

Entities bearing the R&S tag, imported into the UK federation via eduGAIN are not required to obtain support from a UK federation member, since the UK federation recognises the competence of the federation operator who registered the SP and the strength of the eduGAIN policy declaration they have made. However in the event that an issue is raised against that Service Provider by a UK federation member, the UK federation reserves the right to require explicit support and to take additional measures if necessary.

How do I request that my SP gets the R&S category?

Send an email to the UK federation service desk, at service@ukfederation.org.uk requesting that the R&S entity category be added to your SP's registration.

  • The request MUST include an entityID for a registered SP (or be part of a registration request).
  • The request MUST be emailed to us by an appropriate person. In the case of an existing entity, this would be the administrative contact for the entity or Management Contact for the organization. New registration requests must always come from an organization's Management Contact. (A description of the various roles is available here.)
  • You MUST confirm that the SP is a production entity.
  • You MUST confirm that the SP refreshes federation metadata at least daily.
  • If your SP does not support the SAML2 HTTP-POST binding, please ensure it does and provide us with the appropriate AssertionConsumerService endpoint.
  • If your SP does not include a mdui:DisplayName, please supply one.
  • If your SP does not include a mdui:InformationURL, please supply one. The page this URL resolves to should describe how your SP facilitates research and scholarship interaction, collaboration or management.

What happens next?

The UK federation will ensure that you have obtained support for your application, and will ensure that you have satisfied the essential criteria. Once confirmed, we will add the entity category to your SP's metadata and it will be published shortly afterwards

R&S Category support for Identity Providers

R&S support for IdPs is self-asserted, and indicates that the IdP will release the minimal attribute bundle for a subset of its users to SPs that have the R&S entity category registered in metadata.

The UK federation encourages support of this entity category.

Pre-requisites

  • You should be familiar with the R&S entity category specification.
  • IdPs which support this entity category will release personally identifying information when users authenticate at a site, so you must ensure that your organization's data policies and governance procedures have been followed.
  • You must ensure that that your IdP is configured so that it releases the attribute bundle automatically. There are some configuration examples for Shibboleth IdPs on the REFEDS wiki. You can use the UK federation's R&S test SP at https://test.ukfederation.org.uk/research-and-scholarship/ to test attribute release.

How do I show that my IdP supports the R&S category?

Send an email to the UK federation service desk, at service@ukfederation.org.uk requesting that R&S entity category support be added to your IdP's registration.

What must be in the request?

  • The request MUST include an entityID for a registered IdP (or be part of a registration request).
  • The request MUST be emailed to us by an appropriate person. In the case of an existing entity, this would be the administrative contact for the entity or Management Contact for the organization. New registration requests must always come from an organization's Management Contact. (A description of the various roles is available here.)
  • The request MUST include a claim that the IdP supports the R&S entity category.

We would also appreciate hearing the reason for wanting to denote R&S support. Are there are specific SPs which require you to do so? Did you hear about it at a specific event? Are there any barriers to getting it through your governance process? Thank you!

What happens next?

The UK federation then adds the entity category support element to your IdP's metadata and it is published shortly afterwards.