ACADEMIA

InCommon, the first nationwide U.S. identity management federation for higher education, today announced that its community has significantly expanded: ten additional universities, four service providers, and for the first time a private identity provider have joined the other leading organizations on its growing participant roster. "The research and education community, which today depends upon online resources through its partnerships with content and service providers, has been at the forefront of deploying the federated identity management approach," said Tracy Mitrano, director of Information Technology Policy, Cornell University and chair of the InCommon Steering Committee. "InCommon's growth signals the continuing adoption of this approach by more leading universities and forward-thinking service providers who see immediate value in participating in a scalable and secure trust community." Among the new participants are four diverse service providers: Turnitin, Symplicity, Houston Academy of Medicine - Texas Medical Center Library, and Cdigix, Inc. InCommon participants can partner with: Turnitin to access its online plagiarism prevention service; Symplicity to leverage its career management and recruiting tools; Houston Academy of Medicine - Texas Medical Center Library for its wide range of online medical content; as well as Cdigix for its comprehensive portfolio of legally available digital entertainment and educational content. Cdigix's recently-announced partnership with the University of Washington leverages InCommon to offer students and faculty digital media content. Using InCommon, the university and Cdigix ensure appropriate access by students to the resources without unnecessarily revealing their personal information. University of Maryland Baltimore County and Penn State University have partnered with Symplicity to help students manage, identify and apply for internships and post-academic careers through InCommon. And, Penn State uses Turnitin plagiarism protection services via InCommon to offer its professors the ability to better monitor for plagiarism and to provide students with tools to ensure proper attribution methods in their academic works. "To meet the increasing campus demand for using external applications and online resources, we developed and implemented solutions that efficiently use our existing information infrastructures securely and safely in such a way that we maintain control over the release of personal information for people at Penn State," said Kevin Morooney, vice provost of Penn State University. "InCommon is a vitally important part of this infrastructure and helps put us in a position to provide a richer, easier to use, safer online experience for Penn State students, faculty, and staff." InCommon provides a framework for its participating universities and sponsored partners to share protected online information and Web resources in a highly secure environment while optionally protecting the privacy of individual users who require access to these critical online materials. InCommon, which leverages Shibboleth middleware technology, eases the administrative and security burdens of online service providers and universities through the use of a single sign on system for users to access multiple resources from different content providers; enables scalability for resource providers since they can provide protected content to multiple campuses and universities using a single authentication and authorization framework; and provides ease of use and deployment by leveraging a campus' existing identity management infrastructure. Universities that have recently joined InCommon include: Miami University; Ohio University; Stanford University; University of Alabama at Birmingham; University of California - Merced; University of California - Riverside; The University of Chicago; University of Maryland, Baltimore; University of Maryland Baltimore County; and University of Virginia. For universities that do not yet have mature identity management systems in place, ProtectNetwork, which recently joined the InCommon federation via sponsorship by the University of Washington, is InCommon's first private identity provider. ProtectNetwork gives users basic or fully-proofed identity credentials to enable students and staff to gain access to resources protected by the Shibboleth authorization system. Vinay Kumar, president at ProtectNetwork added, "ProtectNetwork Identity Provider service offers unique value to campuses and other institutions who want to provide identity management services to their users but who may not yet have the necessary systems in place to support this approach or who may need to segment specific constituencies in different ways. By participating in InCommon, ProtectNetwork allows a broader range of campuses and service providers to take advantage of all the resources and benefits of a trusted federated community by providing highly secure and authenticated identity credentials for any segment of their user community."