Main features

You can take advantage of all of the following powerful features by using InAcademia:

-                                        Discount eligibility validation:
+                                        Verifies whether a user holds a specific role (e.g., student, staff, faculty) at a participating higher education institution (referred to as ‘affiliation’). Connects to the institution’s identity and access management (IDAM) systems to validate affiliations securely.
-                                        Role verification:
+                                        Verifies whether a user has been assigned one of the key academic user roles, including students, staff, faculty and employees.
-                                        Privacy preservation:
+                                        Returns only a simple confirmation of affiliation, and so minimises the amount of personal data processed by discarding unnecessary information.
-                                        Fraud prevention:
+                                        Detects attempts to reuse one-time-only offers through our re-use detection feature (see below for more information on re-use detection).
-                                        Custom control over access:
+                                        Use our IdP Hinting feature to determine users at which institutions or countries can access your offer. This is accessed via a simple, auto-updating JSON feed (refreshed hourly), enabling: a custom prompt list, or a dropdown of eligible institutions.
-                                        Broad geographic reach:
+                                        If you prefer to support all InAcademia-participating countries (currently 39), implement our discovery service that has a clean and user-friendly interface and smart search for selecting institutions.
-                                        Based on well-known protocols:
+                                        InAcademia provides an OIDC-based gateway to academic federated identity systems.
-                                        Trustworthy:
+                                        Operated by members of the academic federated identity community.
-                                        Pre-production testing facility:
+                                        Access to a pre-production service allows testing before full production launch.

Please note: the InAcademia Service makes no attempt to create a relationship with users/students; its operators are in no way responsible or obligated to the end user for any aspect of the products/services subject to the purchase. InAcademia does not act as an agent for the student, merchant, institution or identity federation, and its academic validation is a non-linear process that does not relate to the sale itself.

Geographic availability

Albania, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Uganda

Advanced features

Simple method to present in-scope institutions for users to select:	InAcademia's IdP hinting feature provides an easy-to-implement way to control which institutions and/or markets are eligible for your offers. We provide a repository of JSON feeds that your solution can consume in order to populate prompts or drop down lists of in-scope institutions. It can be used to fill prompts or dropdowns with eligible institutions, allowing merchants to start the login process when a user selects their institution. The feeds are updated frequently, which has the added benefit that if an institution changes the endpoint of its identity provider, or a new institution is introduced, the merchant will inherit the changes in a way that doesn't disrupt the validation process.
Supports “one-time only offer” verification:	The re_use detection feature adds a claim to the OIDC request that will elicit a privacy-preserving response from InAcademia that contains a pseudonymised hash of any supported persistent identifiers received from the IdP, presenting a series of values that merchants permitted to use the persistent flow can utilise in order to recognise a returning user, for example, allowing merchants to identify whether a user has already consumed a one-per-user offer.
Provides confirmation of affiliated institution:	The IdP Hint Assertion feature, when combined with IdP Hinting, makes it possible for a merchant to be satisfied that the user verified at the same institution that they selected when initiating the authentication process, adding further assurance in use cases that require affiliation to a specified institution.

Founded on OpenID Connect

Merchants connect to InAcademia using the widely adopted OIDC protocol. InAcademia provides a uniform technical experience for merchants and presents a familiar single-sign-on user interface to users. InAcademia provides a gateway to the heterogeneous, largely SAML-based landscape of R&E Identity Federations and academic Identity Providers in the background, thus removing the need to support older protocols, and hiding all the complexity that is inherent in the varying policies of federation and identity provider solutions.

InAcademia’s enhanced workflow adds a vital layer of intelligence to native OIDC and SAML errors, making it much easier for merchants to determine the most appropriate user outcomes for the result of all validation requests.

More technical information about InAcademia.

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