Scholarly Consortia: Trusted Facilitators Driving Collaboration
Academic consortia serve as trusted facilitators that unite institutions around shared infrastructure, expertise, and strategic goals. These diverse collaborative organizations are critical partners in building the secure ecosystem that higher education depends on.
Whether focused on library services, joint programs, research collaborations, or administrative efficiencies, all consortia face the challenge of enabling secure access across institutional boundaries—where federated identity becomes essential.
By establishing common identity standards and reducing authentication friction, InCommon helps institutions and their partners do more together than they could alone.
Driving Collective Impact
- Foster collaboration and knowledge sharing across institutions and disciplines.
- Drive research and innovation through unified infrastructure and tools.
- Strengthen research capacity with scalable, secure services.
- Optimize resource use and achieve cost efficiencies at scale.
- Influence policy by modeling best practices and setting shared standards.
- Expand access to education, data, and advanced technologies.
InCommon Helps Consortia Do More, Together.
InCommon Federation enables institutions to share research tools and data securely across organizational boundaries. RENs and consortia can extend this trust fabric to their members, allowing faster, safer access to collaborative environments, without creating new silos or administrative bottlenecks.
eduroam offers secure global Wi-Fi roaming for faculty, students, and researchers. RENs and consortia that deploy eduroam build a connected, mobile-ready ecosystem that supports K12, higher education, and research on and off campus, enhancing experiences while reducing authentication complexity.
The InCommon TAP (Trusted Access Platform) provides robust identity lifecycle tools that support provisioning, deprovisioning, and role-based access. Leveraging InCommon Federation, TAP helps scale IAM capabilities across institutions, essential for enabling research access, cloud integration, and compliance readiness.
InCommon’s Accelerator Programs guide organizations through implementation using expert support and structured milestones. Consortia benefit by onboarding multiple members efficiently and consistently, shortening time to value and boosting impact across their networks.
Catalysts are vetted providers with deep expertise in trust and identity. Consortia can partner with Catalysts to help members plan and execute technical integrations, modernize infrastructure, or adopt new services, ensuring quality outcomes and sustainable change.
InCommon Academy offers technical training designed specifically for higher ed and research environments. RENs and consortia can use these resources to build staff capacity, align practices, and ensure institutions are ready to meet today’s cybersecurity and identity challenges.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does InCommon support onboarding large groups of institutions?
Is it true that only large institutions can benefit from InCommon?
How can I find out if InCommon can help my consortium?
How do we apply for an Accelerator program?
What support is available for K–12 institutions?
Who should I contact first to get started?
Explore Opportunities for Your Network or Consortia
When you reach out, you’ll connect with a member of the InCommon team, experts in working with multi-institution groups like RENs and consortia. We’ll guide you through available options and help build a roadmap based on your priorities, technical readiness, and community needs.
Get Involved
Need help making sense of IAM? Our team of experts specializes in helping research and education institutions implement effective IAM strategy and architecture. Explore our services to see which path you might be ready for most.