The Inacademia service validates academic affiliation of users on behalf of connected Services.
It uses the Home Institutions as the authoritative source, by means of asking the user to authenticate at the InAcademia Service via eduGAIN.
As part of the agreement between the Service and InAcademia, the Service pays a small transaction fee, typically around 10 to 15 eurocent per transaction.
This document describes how the cost and revenue of the InAcademia service should be split, should it turn out the service is generating income.
The income of the InAcademia service must be split in 2 ways, in the described order:
Operational cost
The income of the InAcademia service must be used first and foremost to create a sustainable service. To do so, the income must be used to cover cost to operate, maintain, support, market and innovate the service and underlying dependent AAI services, such as eduGAIN. A budget for InAcademia should always include at least 15% of total budget for innovation.Revenue
Should the Service generate, after operational cost, a positive revenue this money should be used to both flow back to participating NRENs as well as create a funding stream for future development and innovation of AAI related services. Therefor the surplus revenue should be divided as following:
50% of the revenue will be used to lower the membership fee of GEANT for NRENs participating InAcademia service. The amount of the reduction is related to the amount of transactions generated from the participating NREN or their federation.
50% of the revenue will be made available through “The Commons Conservancy”1 where it will be used to fund the development and innovation of AAI related services. New projects will be awarded funding via an OpenCalls program similar to the one used in the GEANT GN4-1 project. GEANT organization will manage this process.