Frequently Asked Questions

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!

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.

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.

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://inacademia.org/pricing/ for more information.

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

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://inacademia.org/participating-federations/

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

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.

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.

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.

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://inacademia.org/technical-overview/

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.