"Research and Scholarship" Entity Category FAQ

Where is the official Research and Scholarship definition?

The formal, approved definition of the REFEDS Research and Scholarship (R&S) Entity Category is published on the REFEDS website. (Note that the URI value of the REFEDS entity attribute resolves to the previously linked web page.)

What type of resources do you consider "research and scholarship"?

The category definition says that: candidates for the Research and Scholarship (R&S) Category are Service Providers that support research and scholarship interaction, collaboration or management as an essential component. Example Service Providers may include (but are not limited to) collaborative tools and services such as wikis, blogs, project and grant management tools that require some personal information about users to work effectively. This Entity Category should not be used for access to licensed content such as e-journals.

Broadly this means that R&S is intended for platforms and services used by researchers where some sort of collaboration, discussion or interaction is required - making the release of personally identifiable information necessary for the service to work properly.  Think about issues like:

As a federation, you should be satisfied that the release of personal data is an essential part of the operation of the service (and not purely to activate added features) and that the service in question, whether commercial or not, exists to support research and scholarship as a primary function.  

Things that should not be included in this category include:

 

What exactly is meant by a "production SAML deployment?"

The following REFEDS R&S requirement:

4.3.1 The Service Provider is a production SAML deployment that supports SAML V2.0 HTTP-POST binding.

may be interpreted as the following pair of requirements:

The latter includes dev and/or staging instances of the overall Service Provider deployment.