The advantages are so obvious. What are the real-world problems for getting this established? Thanks for posting this. - Björn Brembs

would be nice to have it as an OpenID as well ;) and have it really open, not owned/authored by a for-profit organization.. - Yaroslav Nikolaev

OpenID+. Having a site that (a) function as OpenID provider, (b) contains information about you (e.g. department, contact details) that _you_ are in control of (i.e. edit/hide), (c) can autogenerate your publication list, and (d) allows you to manually add other contributions to the advancement of science (e.g. open source projects). We'd need the backing of one or more major publishers, but stranger things have happened. Can't we set something up like that? - Jan Aerts

Sounds like a good idea. One ID to rule them all.... - Allyson Lister

+1 Jan. Between OpenID and the auto-publication-list generators at places like Nature Network and BioMedExperts, it seems like most of the necessary functionality exists, just not in one place. - Bill Hooker

There are initial investigations being made (certainly within the field of publishing and the library community) towards institutional identifiers which may well be easier to handle than trying to do the individual author identifiers. - Jill O'Neill

But institutional identifiers alone will not work. I've moved quite a few times and saw that people still try to contact me on the email address from two jobs back, because that was the email of the "corresponding author". - Jan Aerts

Would it help if journals suggested to authors that they include their OpenID with their address details, if they have one? That should be pretty easy to do. - Maxine

Maxine: Yes ! That would be great ! It would be nice to see that OpenID just like we can see the DOI of the paper ! This would motivate the other publishers to do this ! - Pierre Lindenbaum

Maxine: Yes, yes, yes! That would be absolutely brilliant! Are Rafael, Simon, and Peter (or Bora) about? This might actually work! - Cameron Neylon

I'm not a guru about OpenID. Can it be then used later to find the publications/geoloc/social networks ? - Pierre Lindenbaum

In the medium term I agree with Maxine: let journals suggest to authors to include their OpenID. But I'm also with Deepak's comment in the "related entry": we should separate our author ID from our general online identity. I'm still brooding on how this all could be incorporated into a system where you as a researcher can update your scientific contributions yourself in a central place... - Jan Aerts

Pierre: I suppose you still need a central website/database, like researcherID.com for example (I know: not open and stuff...). Ideally you'd log in using an OpenID which would also be your researcherID. Even better: the system could function as an OpenID provider itself (that would keep your scientific identity separate from your general online identity). But the website would then have all functionality to find publications/geoloc/social networks. Am I (a) kicking in open doors or (b) making no sense? - Jan Aerts

Jan: That makes sense. Of course it would be great if the NCBI could be this OpenId provider (well, at least for the biologists... ) - Pierre Lindenbaum

Pierre: NCBI could indeed be an OpenID provider, but it should be limited to that. We need a separate entity doing the publication/geo... functionality. This is important enough that it should be the core function of the entity providing it. Also: would be nice if we could add contributions like "have helped in discussion about blabla on FriendFeed" :-). (Or is that "distracted discussion from blabla") - Jan Aerts

All you really need is a unique identifier - it could be an openid or it could be a random string. The advantage of openid is that it acts as a pointer to a service which treats you as a resource. Services can then connect that to any other information that is available. The other advantage of openid is that the provider is completely irrelevant - it can be anybody from the journal to NCBI to an institution to a third party. You're never tied into one provider. - Cameron Neylon

I'll say there was an interesting meeting early this year sponsored by CNI to bring publishers, A&I vendors (like Thompson Scientific), library reps (including OCLC and LIbrary of Congress), and others with interest in this to talk about it. OpenID was mentioned but many publishers and vendors already have their own (internal and not eager to share) identification systems. I'm not sure if anything definite came out of that meeting unfortunately (and I was there). - Sarah

Maxine, if you get this proposal rolling, your name will be legion :) - Neil Saunders

previous discussions about this subject on FF: http://tinyurl.com/6p3evw http://tinyurl.com/6m3w88 http://tinyurl.com/564amw http://tinyurl.com/5arawr http://tinyurl.com/5vnmxu - Pierre Lindenbaum

Sarah - quite a few of these points were made in the EMBO piece at the link. In fact, probably the article is a report arising from that meeting - though there is not much information of that sort, or about the author, there (ironically!). I will ask about the "display openID" and get back to you - will not be instant because one person is away until new year, but I won't forget. - Maxine

BTW there has been a lot of discussion on this in Nature over the years too - since 2006 when I started the author blog I have attempted to capture the discussion there, see: http://blogs.nature.com/nautilu... (includes Raf's correspondence in fact). - Maxine

Finally got round to blogging about this. Let me know what you think....http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/blogs... - Chris Leonard

@Chris : in my view, this central repository (CrossRef/NCBI?) would associate this ID with a FOAF file containing all the information you want to publicity release :, your interests, your web accounts, your contacts, your publications.... - Pierre Lindenbaum

Yes, sounds good Pierre. According to the EMBO article at the link and various others, one issue is all the world's registration systems recognising the ID. Other issues, also. As we mentioned in another thread very recently, I am following up on this and it is on the agenda of a wider discussion about authorship and related issues that is going on between various journals - I will keep people posted with what I hear. - Maxine

One major problem with setting up UAIDs seems to be the identification of a single provider of these IDs, and the monopoly that would result from it. So I feel like asking a provocative question: does one really need to have only one UAID provider ? When nucleotide databases were started, new sequences were communicated either to EMBL or Genbank, or even to other, more specialised, repositories. Pretty soon afterwards, the databases realised that they had to share all of their contents, and sequences ended up with two (or more ) accession numbers. But if we look back in time a little bit further, we will see that, at first, scientists could publish their new sequences without communicating them to databases, and they quite often did so, either out of laziness, or to preserve the privilege of having the computerised form of those sequences. It is only when most publishers started DEMANDING that authors provide the accession numbers of those sequences that nucleotide databases became really exhaustive and useful. I think that UAIDs will only become really widespread if most publishers start requesting that all authors on submitted papers provide at least one type of unique author ID ( as well as funding bodies from applicants for money). And it would not have to be with one single UAID operator. Different UAID providers could offer different types of interface and/or services ( attached web pages, blogs, bibliometry analyses ...) , as long as the minimal info was provided ( ie the list of publications vetted by the authors themselves, in an open access format). The question will then evolve into the openness and interoperability of the various systems, but that is something that should be much easier to solve than sorting out between authors with identical names ! - Etienne Joly