What is "R&S"? Identity Providers

REFEDS is asking all institutions that have an Identity Provider within a Research and Education Identity Federation to support "R&S". Here is why.

	Research and Education Identity Federations are designed to protect the privacy of users – which means only personal information that is strictly necessary is passed to services to help you access services.
	Many services designed to support research have a proven need for a small set of personal attributes to provide the desired service – an example might be a grant system that needs your name and email address to communicate information about grants.
	REFEDS has identified a small set of attributes that work for a large majority of our research and scholarship services – these are name, email address and a unique identifier for the user.
	A challenge for institutions using Identity Federations is working out which Service Providers have a genuine need for attributes and configuring an attribute release policy for each service.
	“R&S” addresses this problem for you. The audit of service providers is done by your federation against legal requirements and attribute release is automatically applied to the service decreasing the overhead for Identity Providers and barriers to access for your users.
	To find out more about how to implement R&S please visit the REFEDs website.

Research and Education Identity Federations are designed to protect the privacy of users – which means only personal information that is strictly necessary is passed to services to help you access services.