InAcademia for Institutions

InAcademia helps to protect the privacy of users when they’re attempting to gain access to discounted products and services; accessible services include Spotify, YouTube Premium, Autodesk, Tableau, Adobe, Code Academy, Bloomberg, Clarivate, as well as helping uesrs to validate their eligibility to join the MyUNiDAYS marketplace.
InAcademia’s privacy-first design ensures that only the absolute minimum personal information is shared with those services.

InAcademia is operated by the same collaboration of organisations that manage eduGAIN, eduroam and MyAcademicID.

InAcademia is a Service Provider in eduGAIN registered by SWAMID, the Swedish academic identity federation.  InAcademia acts as a proxy service to would-be service providers that need only validate the academic affiliation of a user, creating a logical separation between your identity provider and commercial services who wish to benefit from academic federated identities. Therefore, through its utilisation of eduGAIN, InAcademia is the real-time, digital equivalent of showing a student card to service providers that offer discounts or provide access to products and services that are reserved only for academia, and as it is operated by trusted organisations, it is an ideal proxy to businesses that would generally not qualify for inclusion as an eduGAIN service provider, but nevertheless provide an attractive service for your users.

The InAcademia Service is a lightweight alternative to full federated identity access for merchants and with its minimal, pseudonymised attribute release, it assists merchants in the preservation of user privacy.

By opting into and/or releasing attributes to InAcademia you’re helping to preserve the privacy of your users when they need to provide evidence of their eligibility for discounts or gated offers in a retail/non-academic setting, as it can remove the need for merchants to perform e-mail address-based verification or request scans of ID cards. Instead, InAcademia can accurately represent the real time affiliation of a person in the academic community using eduGAIN.

Merchants embed InAcademia into their validation processes, and users that are asked to consent to InAcademia sharing their confirmed affiliation with the relevant service in such a way that preserves their privacy and minimises the exchange of personal information. InAcademia will only share a confirmation of the affiliation attribute value released along with a pseudonymised identifer, meaning that you can be certain that only the bare minimum of data is released to the merchant.

The proxy relationship also means that IdP Operators can be certain that the attributes are only used in active compliance with  the GEANT Code of Conduct. In contrast, access via federation membership risks allowing service providers access to more attributes than they should justifiably request. Please refer to our Privacy Statement.

Why support InAcademia?

Using InAcademia makes it easier for Institutions to broker the relationship between users and the third parties that offer discounted services to students, faculty, staff and employees. InAcademia’s use of federated access removes the need for Institutions and merchants themselves (whether contracts or technical development). This means that users can benefit from multiple downstream services, and the IdP Operator needs only to support a single SP that proxies all the rest.

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

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

What do I have to do to use InAcademia?

Ensure that your IdP in your national federation 1) accepts connections from services in eduGAIN, and 2) releases the required attributes. That’s it! To find out what that means in practice, refer to 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.

What services are registered with InAcademia?