Any specific reason? - Deepak Singh

Does that mean they don't use flickr? gmail? delicious? etc etc - Deepak Singh

now, if services were all to support OpenID, and scientists understood how they could use it to their advantage ... maybe that would be less of an issue. - Andrew Perry

@Deepak Yes to all of the above. I'm always getting emails that begin "I went to visit your [whatever] at [some site], but it said I had to create an account". To which I think - so why didn't you, instead of telling me about it? - Neil Saunders

Andrew, Neil's answer suggests that openID would not work as well. You still need to "sign up" - Deepak Singh

perhaps it would help if an openID were provided by an authority "acceptable" to most scientists? - Neil Saunders

Nature as openid provider? - Deepak Singh

Certainly, the initial signup is a barrier, but the idea is that most scientists probably already have OpenIDs and just don't know it, or know how to use them (most scientists would already have a Yahoo or Google account, even if they don't use it heavily). If these OpenID providers accepted each other as valid providers, and worked to educate users "just use your OpenID, everywhere", signing up wouldn't be considered a chore (AFAIK they don't all currently accept 'competitors' accounts as OpenID logins). - Andrew Perry

In a properly working OpenID 'ecosystem' there would only be one 'signup' event, that most users have already done. After that it's just a single myname.myopenid.com to sign on. But I'm sure y'all already know how it _should_ work :) - Andrew Perry

I kinda like the idea of independent openid providers, essentially an independent third party provider, just like a DNS provider, but you have a point - Deepak Singh

This is sadly a fact that too many people working in tech-transfer offices don't know. I keep being asked to protect services against industry using them by requiring users to have an account. I have to repeatedly tell tech-transfer that if I did that, I would have no users. - Lars Juhl Jensen

And how do you protect against users when universities stop distributing .edu addresses? - Deepak Singh

Because anyone can be an OpenID provider that makes it easier for people to get accounts and many already have compatible services like Yahoo and Google. If more people knew how to use these features it would reduce their barriers to participation. - Mike Chelen

@Lars Ha! I had the exact same argument with tech transfer over filtering by email address. - Neil Saunders