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Frequently Asked Questions


Below are some of the most Frequently Asked Questions about InAcademia.

If you're a merchant or Institution wanting to support InAcademia validation for your users then please:


Please Note: The service isn’t offered directly to students but we provide answers to some of the questions that we’ve been asked by users of the service below.

What does the Discovery Service look like? And what does it do?

A Discovery Service allows users to select their home institution from a pre-configured list of the institutions that can be accessed by the InAcademia service using the eduGAIN infrastructure.

What happens when a user selects a supported institution at the discovery service?

The InAcademia Service redirects the user to its institutional identity provider, providing users with valid accounts the ability to login.

What happens when the user logs in?

If the user has a valid account, the identity provider will return a specified attribute, which InAcademia will read and translate to a successful validation. The user will be asked to consent to the result being returned to your webshop…

…and the cart will present the user with a positive confirmation that they have qualified for the discount, allowing them to proceed to the Checkout:

What if the user can’t login at the selected institution?

If the user attempts to login and cannot provide valid credentials, the user will be returned to the cart where an appropriate error will be displayed confirming that they have not been validated.

The Notice and Button persist in this scenario in order to make it possible for the user to repeat the process at an alternative identity provider, which supports users that mistakenly selected the wrong institution at first, or are affiliated with more than one institution.

What if the user can’t find a supported institution?

The Discovery Service will prompt the user with search tips, but if the user cannot find it’s institution, it will be unable to validate its eligibility for your discount using this service and will need to proceed without the discount.

What if the user is a member of the institution and is able to login, but is not a student or the institution does not release the ‘student’ affiliation?

The user will be presented with a message saying “Error: access_denied Description: affiliation does not match requested validation”; the discount won’t be applied to the shopping cart, but the user will be able to continue with their purchase at your store.

Is it possible for subscribers to access a set of test credentials to use at discovery?

The Student Discount for WooCommerce plugin provides access to InAcademia’s operational/live production service, and for eduGAIN policy and security reasons, it is not allowable to publish test credentials to the Discovery Service.

What is eduGAIN?

eduGAIN is an identity and access management infrastructure that helps nearly 27,000,000 students, researchers and educators access online services while minimising the number of accounts users have to manage – reducing costs, complexity and security risks. Each member country has a national federation of identity providers at its constituent institutions, and eduGAIN creates an interfederation of the national identity federations, facilitating a single point of discovery for all participating institutions.

What does ‘ClientID must match the ClientID allocated by your subscription’ mean?

This means that the ClientID field contains a value that does not match the value that is published alongside your subscription in your account. Please refer to your subscription details and make sure you’ve copied the correct value into the settings. You can find a link to your account in your order confirmation email.

What does ‘Client Secret must match the Client Secret allocated by your subscription’ mean?

This means that the ClientSecret field contains a value that does not match the value that is published alongside your subscription in your account. Please refer to your subscription details and make sure you’ve copied the correct value into the settings. You can find a link to your account in your order confirmation email.

Why would a user see ‘Error: access_denied Description: affiliation does not match requested validation’

This means that the user successfully logged into their institution but that their institutional identity provider released an affiliation attribute value that did not match ‘student’, and so the user cannot be validated as a student. They will not be able to validate their affiliation using the InAcademia service and you will need to make alternative arrangements for these customers.

Why would a user see ‘Error: access_denied Description: no affiliation’

This means that the user successfully logged into their institution but that their institutional identity provider did not release any affiliation attribute value,, and so the user cannot be validated as a student. They will not be able to validate their affiliation using the InAcademia service and you will need to make alternative arrangements for these customers.

Why would a user see ‘Error: access_denied Description: authentication failed’

This means that the user successfully logged into their institution but that the authentication response contained an authentication error, and so the user cannot be validated as a student. They will not be able to validate their affiliation using the InAcademia service and you will need to make alternative arrangements for these customers.

Why would a user see ‘Error: access_denied Description: User Consent Denied’

This means that the user successfully logged into their institution but they did not consent to the InAcademia service providing the result of the validation to your service. They will not be able to validate their affiliation using the InAcademia service and you will need to make alternative arrangements for these customers.

Why would a user see ‘Error: client ID missing or client not registered’

This signifies one of a number of issues:

a) your plugin has not been connected to your InAcademia Service subscription, or

b) your plugin has been configured to use the incorrect clientID or client secret.

In both cases, you must visit Your Account and make sure that the values printed in your subscription details match the values that you input into the InAcademia Plugin settings UI exactly. It can take up to 15 minutes for the registration to complete in our backend systems. If you have checked the above, and waited at least 15 minutes, please raise a support request.

c) your subscription has lapsed (payment failed, card expired, or you cancelled your subscription).

In this scenario, if you’d like to continue using the extension, please renew your subscription; alternatively deactivate the plugin which will remove the Button and/or Notice from your shopping cart.

Why would a user see ‘Error: redirect_uri missing or not registered’

This signifies one of a number of issues:

a) your plugin has not been connected to your InAcademia Service subscription, or

b) your plugin has been configured to use the incorrect Redirect URI.

In both cases, you must visit Your Account and make sure that the values printed in your subscription details match exactly the value that was provided in InAcademia Plugin settings UI. It can take up to 15 minutes for the registration to complete in our backend systems. If you have checked the above, and waited at least 15 minutes, please raise a support request.

c) your subscription has lapsed (payment failed, card expired, or you cancelled your subscription).

In this scenario, if you’d like to continue using the extension, please renew your subscription; alternatively deactivate the plugin which will remove the Button and/or Notice from your shopping cart.

Definition: Affiliated

 An affiliation type asserting that at least one affiliation type applies to the user.

Definition: Affiliation types

InAcademia is capable of validating the following values: student, employee, faculty, staff, member, as defined by the eduPerson Schema, eduPerson Affiliation definitions.

InAcademia uses eduGAIN as the basis of its identity authentication process.  There are a number of technical terms used within InAcademia to describe the process and the key stakeholders of the authentication system.

Definition: Employee

An affiliation type describing an individual who works part-time or full-time under a contract of employment at the Institution, and has recognized rights and duties.

Definition: Faculty

An affiliation type describing an employee of an Institution who has specific duties around learning, teaching and/or research.

Merchant: Institution

An institution is an organisation which fulfills at least one of the following criteria:

  • the organization is dedicated to education and research and grants academic degrees according to ISCED 2011 [ISCED] or equivalent internationally recognized degree levels.
  • the organization is a research library or archive
  • the organization is primarily dedicated to conducting research
  • the organization is a teaching hospital
  • any organization explicitly denoted as an education and research institution by a government entity in the jurisdiction where the claim of being a education and research institution is made
  • the funding mechanism (private, public or mixed) is not a factor in the definition. For instance, privately funded research institutions may be included if they fulfill at least one of the criteria above.

Definition: Merchant 

A retail or e-commerce organisation that provides its customers (user) access to InAcademia.

Definition: Student

An affiliation type describing a person who is enrolled at or attends classes at an institution. The definition will vary according to local/national policies.

Definition: User

 Persons who use InAcademia to prove their affiliation type towards a third-party.

What is InAcademia?

InAcademia is the real-time, digital equivalent of asking a student or academic to show you their university or student card in order to access or buy your services and products. Using InAcademia will mean that you no longer need to rely on university email addresses or to wait for prospective users to provide copies of identity cards or documentation before you can engage with them. It provides an efficient solution that minimises costs and risks of manual processing.

InAcademia provides a light-weight online service that taps into the world of federated academic identity, removing the need to incur manual processing overheads, which are expensive and create data privacy risks.

When you’re looking to target the student and academic community in your online sales plan, sometimes you need to be certain that the users claiming offers, discounts and services are entitled to do so. InAcademia is ideally positioned to provide a simple but trustworthy validation of “student-ness” or other academic affiliation for exactly that purpose!

How does InAcademia validate academic affiliation?

InAcademia leverages the eduGAIN interfederation, acting as a proxy service to services that need only validate the academic affiliation of a user. Offering InAcademia via your Federation offers a lighter weight option for services that would otherwise request membership as SPs, but do not need access to the full set of attributes offered by federation membership. Referring such services to InAcademia, means that Identity Federations are also able to provide an entry-level, low-maintenance alternative to joining the federation, whilst still increasing the number of added-value services available to IdPs as a result.

What is a merchant?

A merchant is an e-commerce organisation that provides its customers (users) access to academic discounts and services. Merchants are customers of the InAcademia service.

As a national Identity Federation operator, what is the value of InAcademia and why promote InAcademia?

  • InAcademia is a service available to NRENs/Federations via eduGAIN that reduces the effort of onboarding services to national federations.
  • InAcademia is a trusted party that acts as a proxy between IdP and merchant. This has three primary benefits:
    • it unifies the setup and experience for retail services that wish to offer discounts and services to your constituency,
    • it reduces the support effort for institutions: opting into InAcademia once means its users can access retail discounts without exposing personally identifiable information to the merchant.
    • it mitigates the risk against misconfigured Identity Providers releasing irrelevant information to commercial services.
  • This proxy relationship also means that registered merchants automatically and actively comply with the GEANT Code of Conduct.
  • Where commercial service providers in eduGAIN are free to request multiple attributes when using federated identity, InAcademia requests only the attributes necessary to confirm academic affiliation, and does not share the attribute values received from IdPs with its downstream services.
  • InAcademia responds to a merchant request for validation with pseudonymised identifiers, and strips out any superfluous PII returned by the IdP before returning an id_token to the client, meaning that it’s a truly privacy preserving route to using academic federated identities.
  • Identity Federations can offload SPs to InAcademia whose use case only requires a success or denied answer in response to an affiliation request from a user, thereby removing the need to support them directly. This greatly reduces the effort that the Identity Federation would need to invest to bring those SPs up to join their federation.
  • InAcademia allows OIDC-only services to benefit from federated identity.
  • Being able to widen the number and variety of SPs available in your federation is an exciting proposition for IdP organisations and end users, and InAcademia helps Identity Federations to achieve this without proportionately increasing the support burden.
  • As SPs often don’t understand federated identity, Federations spend a disproportionate amount of time to onboard them; promoting InAcademia will save effort and cost for your Federation.
  • InAcademia can provide operational data to your Identity Federation operations that can help to identity and resolve any misconfigured IdPs.

How is InAcademia governed?

InAcademia was  created by a group of Identity Federation operators and is actively managed by members of Identity Federations under the GEANT Project. You can have a say, and can actively be involved in influencing the InAcademia future direction and roadmap. We encourage you to express your interest using the contact form or via the eduGAIN communication channels.

How is the revenue collected from InAcademia distributed?

The intention is that any revenue will be used to help to sustain delivery of InAcademia service, eduGAIN and Federation Operators in future, therefore, there may be some tangible, financial benefit in promoting InAcademia amongst your community.

As a Federation Operator, do I have to pay a fee to use InAcademia?

No! InAcademia is funded by a combination of commercial revenue and funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 856726 (GN4-3).

Can the affiliation validation be trusted?

InAcademia uses data that universities and research institutions maintain about their users so that they can provide their own services to users effectively and securely. This data comes directly from the organisation’s internal identity and access management systems, and is utilised to provide access to academic services and publishing resources. Because the data that is utilised by InAcademia is a vital part of their organisation’s support services, it’s in an organisation’s own interest to keep data up-to-date and accurate.

How can a merchant be sure that students don’t share accounts?

Students do not need to register accounts with the InAcademia Service in order to benefit from the services that retailers offer; instead, they will simply use their institutional credentials to verify their affiliation status using the principles of federated login. InAcademia redirects users/students to the authentication service of their university or institution. By entering their credentials they prove themselves to be legitimately affiliated with that institution. If a user were to share their university credentials with another individual, they would break fundamental security policies at their registered institution, and their course membership would be at risk.

How much does InAcademia cost to use?

InAcademia Service is subject to a ‘per validation’ fee that will be invoiced regularly. In circumstances where the merchant requesting access to InAcademia operates to non-profit principles, it might be possible to use InAcademia for free. Please refer to https://dev.inacademia.org/pricing/ for more information.

How is InAcademia supported?

Support is offered in accordance with https://dev.inacademia.org/service-policy/; premium levels of support may be made available, depending on requirements.

Where is InAcademia available?

InAcademia is being used in live retail workflows in Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Greenland, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Malta, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and Turkey. It is permitted for use across Europe and will become available in other European countries as more retailers adopt the service. We are currently recruiting commercial use cases as launch partners in all European countries, particularly in Czechia and Hungary, and also in New Zealand. Although we cannot guarantee that InAcademia can interact with all academic institutions, we can work with you to understand the markets you’d like to target, and with national  Identity Federations to establish a roll out plan that meets your needs; please contact us for more information.

See also https://dev.inacademia.org/participating-federations/

Can I validate affiliations other than ‘student’?

InAcademia can provide other affiliation statements such as faculty, employee and staff – see /technical-overview/technical-overview).

What is meant by ‘student-ness’ or ‘student affiliation’?

The definition of ‘student’ differs widely among academic institutions. We deliver academic affiliation according to the locally accepted definition, which may extend to full-time, part-time, and mature students. We use the term ‘student-ness’ to describe this.

What are the benefits of InAcademia compared to national Identity Federation membership?

Merchants are entitled to choose either route, depending on the policies of various local Identity Federations, but taking the local identity federation membership route requires the merchant to maintain registrations and conformance to local policies in every country that they operate in. As such, there are already cases where merchants that had previously joined a local Identity Federation that have since chosen to move to the InAcademia service. Using academic federated identity services can be challenging, and particularly when operating across multiple countries. Merchants have  found the process of engaging to the differing requirements of national Identity Federations difficult. Some national academic identity federation policies require members to approach individual institutions to request ‘opt in’ to their services, and this can be extremely time consuming and very difficult to scale. In contrast, InAcademia provides a uniform technical experience for Merchants, using a familiar single-sign-on user interface to users. InAcademia interacts with the heterogeneous, largely SAML-based landscape of R&E Identity Providers in the background, thus hiding all the complexity that is inherent in the varying policies of federation and identity provider solutions. The InAcademia support team manages this complexity via its close relationship with the academic federated identity community, and is able to connect services in such a way that means they’re available to connect with academic institutions across multiple national identity federations using connection to only one service: InAcademia.

There are various other reasons why InAcademia offers value in cooperation with eduGAIN:

  • Merchants connect to InAcademia using the widely adopted OpenID Connect protocol, and therefore will be more familiar to retailers that have previously implemented single sign-on based on social media services.
  • Where only simple evidence of ‘student status’ is required, InAcademia eases the process in both deployment, connection and maintenance.
  • InAcademia offers an enhanced discovery process, meaning less steps are necessary for users to validate their academic affiliation.
  • InAcademia’s enhanced error handling capabilities improve significantly on the native SAML and OIDC errors, making it much easier for merchants to determine the ongoing workflow for the result of all validation requests.
  • It’s tough for many institutions to support the workload necessary to engage with merchants that want to register as a Service Provider in an Identity Federation; when an Institution accepts the InAcademia service, the Institution no longer has to allocate effort to onboarding specific services, meaning that merchants connected to InAcademia are more likely to be able to reach a wider range of academic institutions than if they were to become a service provider in a federation alone.
  • InAcademia keeps in step with the various developments in policy and technology that would otherwise have to be understood and mitigated in-house by the merchant.
  • The InAcademia brand has been trademarked with the intention to uniquely present to the academic community a trusted and reliable method of proving entitlement to academic offers.
  • Furthermore, we closely collaborate with the research and education community, so there are opportunities to use the InAcademia service and its network of contacts to inform academic institutions that your service is widely available to institutions that have opted into the InAcademia service using trusted methods.

Is there any transfer of personally identifiable information from the merchant to the InAcademia Service?

There is no need for the merchant to transfer any personally identifiable information to InAcademia in the validation request; InAcademia will simply utilise the home institution’s system to interpret the user’s academic affiliation and will complete the validation anonymously, returning a confirmation of affiliation, and a pseudonymised identifier to the merchant using what the OIDC protocol refers to as an ID token.

See Technical Overview for more information.

How does InAcademia validate academic affiliation?

InAcademia uses academic federated identity services which means that it can access information that is directly maintained by the home institution (University) of the user. Using InAcademia,  merchants can  initiate a validation request using the OIDC Protocol towards the InAcademia.org service endpoint. The user is asked by InAcademia to log in to his/her home institution, at which point the institution will release a set of standard attribute values to InAcademia that can be used to prove whether he/she is a member of the academic community. InAcademia compares the affiliation value released by the home institution’s identity service against the value requested by the merchant and a simple OIDC response is passed back to the requesting merchant. For more information, please refer to https://dev.inacademia.org/technical-overview/

What is academic affiliation?

An academic affiliation is a formal connection between an individual and a student. InAcademia uses the eduPerson schema that is accepted by all members of the eduGAIN interfederation. The affiliation values InAcademia validates are: ‘student’, ‘staff’, ‘employee’, ‘faculty’, and ‘member’.

InAcademia allows merchants (retailers) to establish whether a user is formally identified by their home institution as one of these affiliation types.

How are services selected to be available via InAcademia?

There is a high demand in the retail and services sector to reach out to the student and academic population. The service team proactively identifies potential service providers to register to InAcademia, based on published eligibility criteria, but particularly focusing on companies that wish to use federated identities for commercial gain. Only organisations that are of interest to students and academics are considered for connection, and a Steering Committee comprising representatives from national academic identity federations oversees the onboarding of new entities, thereby ensuring that only entities acceptable to the academic community will be registered. Institutions that wish to refer services to InAcademia, are welcome to do so.

Why is InAcademia a good option for Institutions?

Using InAcademia makes it easier for Institutions to connect to third parties that offer services to campuses, students and staff using federated access by removing the need for any coordinated effort between Institution and merchant ( such as the need to agree bilateral data protection agreements or participate in specific technical development) at the point of enabling the service. 

Institutions supporting InAcademia don’t have to support the downstream services, as InAcademia takes care of that. This is because InAcademia makes it possible for Service Providers to make use of academic identities by using a lighter-weight, lower-maintenance, OIDC-compliant alternative to full federation membership. 

InAcademia works with eduGAIN for secure, private authentication and acts as a proxy service to service providers that only need to know if the user is a student or member of your institution. By providing a simple response to an affiliation claim InAcademia offers a uniform, trusted, privacy-preserving way for students to offer proof of academic affiliation. This protects users and removes the need for them to share personal data and documentation to prove their academic affiliation.

How does InAcademia differ from student discount retailers that profit from eduGAIN?

The InAcademia service is offered by GÉANT, the European collaboration of national research and education infrastructures, in partnership with key participants from the eduGAIN community. It is governed by a committee of stakeholders deriving from national identity federations across Europe and aims to operate in a manner that is in the interests of the whole European federated identity ecosystem. It was designed to channel income from the student discount market back to the federated identity community to help sustain eduGAIN.

What services are registered with InAcademia?

Country Service Operating Merchant
Austria educom.at, edustore.at and educlub.at Edustore GmbH
ubook.at ACP TechRent
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
Canada https://prodigyfinance.com/ Prodigy Finance Limited
Denmark

Services include Spotify International.

Refer to all downstream services here.

SheerID
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
Finland

Service offering includes Spotify International, Autodesk, Deezer, Back Market, Google, Tableau, Adobe Systems Inc, TIDAL, SoundCloud, Code Academy, Bloomberg and Clarivate.

Refer to downstream services here.

SheerID
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
France

Service offering includes Spotify International, Autodesk, Deezer, Back Market, Google, Tableau, Adobe Systems Inc, TIDAL, SoundCloud, Code Academy, Bloomberg and Clarivate.

Refer to downstream services here.

SheerID

Register for MyUNiDAYS.com; refer to available services here.

MyUNiDAYS.com
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
https://prodigyfinance.com/ Prodigy Finance Limited
Germany

Register for https://studentenrabatt.com/; refer to downstream services here.

Studentenrabatt.com Service GmbH
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
https://prodigyfinance.com/ Prodigy Finance Limited
Greenland

Service offering includes Spotify International, Autodesk, Deezer, Back Market, Google, Tableau, Adobe Systems Inc, TIDAL, SoundCloud, Code Academy, Bloomberg and Clarivate.

Refer to downstream services here.

SheerID

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
Iceland

Service offering includes Spotify International, Autodesk, Deezer, Back Market, Google, Tableau, Adobe Systems Inc, TIDAL, SoundCloud, Code Academy, Bloomberg and Clarivate.

Refer to downstream services here.

SheerID
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
Italy

Service offering includes Spotify International, Autodesk, Deezer, Back Market, Google, Tableau, Adobe Systems Inc, TIDAL, SoundCloud, Code Academy, Bloomberg and Clarivate.

Refer to downstream services here.

SheerID
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
Malta

Service offering includes Autodesk, Google, Lufthansa Group, Turkish Airlines, Unity Technologies, CodeAcademy, The Economist, Harvard Business Publications, Vectorworks, Strava, Tableau Software, Project Management Institute, Bloomberg LLP, Grammarly, Microsoft and Sinapore Airlines.

Refer to downstream services here.

SheerID

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
Spain

Service offering includes Spotify International, Autodesk, Deezer, Back Market, Google, Tableau, Adobe Systems Inc, TIDAL, SoundCloud, Code Academy, Bloomberg and Clarivate.

Refer to downstream services here.

SheerID
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
Sweden

Service offering includes Spotify International, Autodesk, Deezer, Back Market, Google, Tableau, Adobe Systems Inc, TIDAL, SoundCloud, Code Academy, Bloomberg and Clarivate.

Refer to downstream services here.

SheerID

Register for MyUNiDAYS.com; refer to available services here.

MyUNiDAYS.com
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
Switzerland https://prodigyfinance.com/ Prodigy Finance Limited
The Netherlands Register for Koninklijke Bibliotheek services Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB)

Service offering includes Spotify International, Autodesk, Google, ASOS, Vectorworks, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Storytel, SoundCloud, Tableau Software, Unity Technologies, Turkish Airlines, Back Market, Strava, Act-3D, TIDAL, The Economist, Lenovo, Codecademy, BookBeat, Maxon Computer GmbH, Lufthansa Group, Harvard Business Publishing, Singapore Airlines, National Basketball Association, Alo Moves, The Timberland Company, Bloomberg LP, Grammarly, Microsoft, Burton Snowboards, ADO eBike, Project Management Institute, Alteryx, GitLab, Phase One, G Adventures, VIVAIA, Wacom, MotionVFX, easy-connect, Pantone, Entertainment Partners, Siemens AG and Brief Media.

Refer to downstream services here.

 

SheerID

Register for MyUNiDAYS.com; refer to available services here.

MyUNiDAYS.com
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
https://prodigyfinance.com/ Prodigy Finance Limited
Turkey

Service offering includes Spotify International, Autodesk, Deezer, Back Market, Google, Tableau, Adobe Systems Inc, TIDAL, SoundCloud, Code Academy, Bloomberg and Clarivate.

Refer to downstream services here.

SheerID

Register for MyUNiDAYS.com; refer to available services here.

MyUNiDAYS.com

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd

What do I have to do to enable InAcademia at my Institution?

It is necessary to allow InAcademia to interact with your institution’s SAML Identity Provider, and to release the required attributes. To find out how to enable InAcademia for your members contact the InAcademia team or refer to more information on how to enable InAcademia at your institution.

Institutions that are not a member of a national federation are encouraged to find out more about using federated academic identities.

How does InAcademia meet GDPR requirements?

InAcademia achieves privacy by design and privacy by default:  InAcademia only releases confirmation or denial of academic affiliation (and country/home institution where configured to do so) in response to a service provider’s request for a specific set of attributes (please refer to our Privacy Statement), so you can trust that it is privacy preserving.

InAcademia complies with the GEANT Code of Conduct for Service Providers.

Further details describing workflows and features can be found in our InAcademia and Privacy information.

 

Why should Institutions support InAcademia?

InAcademia makes it possible for Service Providers who have found it technically difficult to join an identity federation to make use of academic identities by providing a lightweight, secure service to third parties without the cost and complexity of developing individual facilities for your institution.

Users at institutions that support InAcademia can benefit from multiple services, and the relative ease of implementation and support effort is expected to lead to a greater number and variety of services available to end users.

Where commercial service providers in eduGAIN are free to request multiple attributes when using federated identity, InAcademia requests only the attributes necessary to confirm academic affiliation, and does not share the attribute values received from IdPs with its downstream services.

Identity federations and institutions can refer local, national and international merchants (third parties offering services to campuses, students and staff) for registration to InAcademia. 

Any surplus income generated by InAcademia will be primarily used to fund the development of services for the academic trust and identity community.

How does InAcademia work?

Merchants embed InAcademia into their processes that validate whether users are eligible for specified offers. The Merchant service initiates an OIDC request towards InAcademia asking the InAcademia service to compare the a specified affiliation, such as ‘student’, ‘faculty’, ‘staff’ or ‘employee’ with the user’s actual affiliation. InAcademia then creates a SAML request towards the related Identity Provider.Users are asked to authenticate and are asked to consent to InAcademia sharing their academic affiliation with the relevant service. InAcademia then returns a response that compares the requested and actual affiliation, and discards any additional attributes in such a way that preserves the user’s privacy and minimises the exchange of personal information that would otherwise be necessary for the user to share. See https://dev.inacademia.org/inacademia-and-privacy/ for more information.

What are the benefits of InAcademia for Institutions?

InAcademia allows users to validate their eligibility for offers at merchants’ websites (web shops) on the basis of the positive verification of their affiliation with an academic institution, but instead of allowing the retail service full access to the attributes released in response to a SAML request, InAcademia removes any superfluous data and returns a simple confirmation of affiliation (based on the eduPerson schema) and a pseudonmyised identifer.

This means that it helps to  support the data minimisation principle.

It  reduces the need for merchants to request e-mail address-based verification or scans of ID cards by accurately representing the real time affiliation of a person in the academic community.

What is the InAcademia Service?

InAcademia is a service available in eduGAIN offered to commercial retailers who use  InAcademia as a real-time, digital equivalent of showing a student card to in order to access academic  discounts, products and services This means that retailers can get some of the benefit of eduGAIN presence, but without having  to operate a service provider.

In summary, the InAcademia Service is…

  • a proxy leveraging the federated identity services provided by eduGAIN
  • a lightweight alternative to full federated identity access for merchants with minimal and pseudonymised attribute release for merchants to assist the preservation of user privacy.
  • utilised by commercial retail services and other services outside the normal scope of national federations

What services are registered with InAcademia?

Country Service Operating Merchant
Austria educom.at, edustore.at and educlub.at Edustore GmbH
ubook.at ACP TechRent
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
Canada https://prodigyfinance.com/ Prodigy Finance Limited
Denmark

Services include Spotify International.

Refer to all downstream services here.

SheerID
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
Finland

Service offering includes Spotify International, Autodesk, Deezer, Back Market, Google, Tableau, Adobe Systems Inc, TIDAL, SoundCloud, Code Academy, Bloomberg and Clarivate.

Refer to downstream services here.

SheerID
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
France

Service offering includes Spotify International, Autodesk, Deezer, Back Market, Google, Tableau, Adobe Systems Inc, TIDAL, SoundCloud, Code Academy, Bloomberg and Clarivate.

Refer to downstream services here.

SheerID

Register for MyUNiDAYS.com; refer to available services here.

MyUNiDAYS.com
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
https://prodigyfinance.com/ Prodigy Finance Limited
Germany

Register for https://studentenrabatt.com/; refer to downstream services here.

Studentenrabatt.com Service GmbH
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
https://prodigyfinance.com/ Prodigy Finance Limited
Greenland

Service offering includes Spotify International, Autodesk, Deezer, Back Market, Google, Tableau, Adobe Systems Inc, TIDAL, SoundCloud, Code Academy, Bloomberg and Clarivate.

Refer to downstream services here.

SheerID

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
Iceland

Service offering includes Spotify International, Autodesk, Deezer, Back Market, Google, Tableau, Adobe Systems Inc, TIDAL, SoundCloud, Code Academy, Bloomberg and Clarivate.

Refer to downstream services here.

SheerID
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
Italy

Service offering includes Spotify International, Autodesk, Deezer, Back Market, Google, Tableau, Adobe Systems Inc, TIDAL, SoundCloud, Code Academy, Bloomberg and Clarivate.

Refer to downstream services here.

SheerID
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
Malta

Service offering includes Autodesk, Google, Lufthansa Group, Turkish Airlines, Unity Technologies, CodeAcademy, The Economist, Harvard Business Publications, Vectorworks, Strava, Tableau Software, Project Management Institute, Bloomberg LLP, Grammarly, Microsoft and Sinapore Airlines.

Refer to downstream services here.

SheerID

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
Spain

Service offering includes Spotify International, Autodesk, Deezer, Back Market, Google, Tableau, Adobe Systems Inc, TIDAL, SoundCloud, Code Academy, Bloomberg and Clarivate.

Refer to downstream services here.

SheerID
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
Sweden

Service offering includes Spotify International, Autodesk, Deezer, Back Market, Google, Tableau, Adobe Systems Inc, TIDAL, SoundCloud, Code Academy, Bloomberg and Clarivate.

Refer to downstream services here.

SheerID

Register for MyUNiDAYS.com; refer to available services here.

MyUNiDAYS.com
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
Switzerland https://prodigyfinance.com/ Prodigy Finance Limited
The Netherlands Register for Koninklijke Bibliotheek services Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB)

Service offering includes Spotify International, Autodesk, Google, ASOS, Vectorworks, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Storytel, SoundCloud, Tableau Software, Unity Technologies, Turkish Airlines, Back Market, Strava, Act-3D, TIDAL, The Economist, Lenovo, Codecademy, BookBeat, Maxon Computer GmbH, Lufthansa Group, Harvard Business Publishing, Singapore Airlines, National Basketball Association, Alo Moves, The Timberland Company, Bloomberg LP, Grammarly, Microsoft, Burton Snowboards, ADO eBike, Project Management Institute, Alteryx, GitLab, Phase One, G Adventures, VIVAIA, Wacom, MotionVFX, easy-connect, Pantone, Entertainment Partners, Siemens AG and Brief Media.

Refer to downstream services here.

 

SheerID

Register for MyUNiDAYS.com; refer to available services here.

MyUNiDAYS.com
Student Mobility BV Student Mobility BV

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd
https://prodigyfinance.com/ Prodigy Finance Limited
Turkey

Service offering includes Spotify International, Autodesk, Deezer, Back Market, Google, Tableau, Adobe Systems Inc, TIDAL, SoundCloud, Code Academy, Bloomberg and Clarivate.

Refer to downstream services here.

SheerID

Register for MyUNiDAYS.com; refer to available services here.

MyUNiDAYS.com

SlideMagic free pro subscription for students

SlideMagic Ltd

Can a user sign up to InAcademia?

A user’s institution can opt into InAcademia via its national identity federation, but a user cannot sign up personally as we do not offer the service directly to end users. Users should speak with their Institution’s IT department to ask for institutional opt-in to the InAcademia Service Provider in eduGAIN

 

Do I need to register my personal details with the InAcademia Service?

No: the user only needs its institutional credentials, which are not shared with InAcademia or with the merchant.

Are any of the details of the purchase shared with a user’s home institution?

No: InAcademia is intentionally unaware of any aspect of the user’s purchase, whether basket content, subscription, type, price or delivery address. InAcademia takes no part in the payment or supply chain concerning the transaction with the merchant/retailer.

Is InAcademia secure?

InAcademia is a safe and secure way to take advantage of academic-only deals without having to share personal documentation with each retailer. What is great about InAcademia is that it uses an existing University ID to authenticate users.  When the user is redirected via InAcademia to its  institution’s access management system* they will be asked to enter their usual login credentials, at which point the institution’s access management system releases a set of attributes to the InAcademia service. This allows the InAcademia service to send a validation response to the online shop, proving that the user is affiliated to an academic organisation. No personally identifiable information such as name, email or account credentials are passed through to the retailer and InAcademia does not have any access to the content of the retail or registration transaction with the merchant.

 

What is InAcademia?

InAcademia is a service that can be used* by organisations to validate if a potential customer is entitled to its academic discounts and services. InAcademia does not form part of the supply chain in buying the product or service, instead it’s an auxiliary service that prevents the need for users to send scans or originals of identity documents to the organisations they wish to buy from or connect with.

*When an institution participates in the eduGAIN Interfederation (see www.edugain.org for more details)

 

How does InAcademia affect the user’s relationship with retailers?

The Service makes no attempt to create a relationship with users/students and its operators are in no way responsible or in any way obligated toward the student for the products/services subject to the purchase or registration process.  InAcademia does not act as an agent for the student, and the identity validation process is a non-linear diversion (sense for student reader?) that does not relate to the sale itself.

Can I trust the InAcademia Service?

InAcademia is brought to you by the same organisations that operate eduroam and MyAcademicID, under the umbrella of the GEANT Association.

The service is governed by a committee of national federation operators that are tasked with ensuring that InAcademia operates in the interests of the academic and education community. Furthermore, InAcademia will not partner with any merchant that exploits or promotes illegal, improper, offensive services/materials or unethical behaviour.

A user arrived at stage.inacademia.org after receiving an error during a transaction with a retailer or service: why is that and what happens next?

A user might see one of the following messages. The user should follow the on-screen instructions and refer back to the retailer or service that they were attempting to order a product or service from, as it will be necessary to re-start the process or to validate eligibility in a different way.

  • Error: client ID missing or client not registered
  • Error: missing or misconfigured redirect URL
  • Error: unable to retrieve state
  • Error: transaction already completed
  • Unknown Error
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