...we are pleased to invite you to join our community of like-minded people who are interested in applications for a user-centric identification system for researchers. The purpose of this website is to serve as a port of call for researchers wishing to learn more about this topic and stimulate discussions. - 'Mummi' Thorisson

Here's a shameless plug for a website our group & collaborators launched last week. May be of interest to FF'ers who participated in lively discussion on the topic back in January: http://friendfeed.com/e... - 'Mummi' Thorisson

I meant to ask - do you want to post this on the linkedin group as well? - Cameron Neylon

@Cameron: sure. I didn't know there was one :) - 'Mummi' Thorisson

Just sent you an invite at Linkedin - if you answer that one I can add you to the group. Anyone else is welcome as well! - Cameron Neylon

Here's a blog entry from Geoffrey Bilder: http://www.crossref.org/CrossTe... - 'Mummi' Thorisson

Great information! I'll use this image in one of my slides: http://www.gen2phen.org/researc... - Björn Brembs

C'mon, Björn. Seriously? I'm surely the *worst* diagram-'drawer' in the world. Totally aesthetically-challenged! But sure, freel free to use it. - 'Mummi' Thorisson

Really good roundup of information. But wait a second... I can't login with an OpenID???? - Jan Aerts

Jan - hit me where it hurts, that's right :) no really, that's a good point. I would have liked to have OpenID support on the site from the get-go. But unfortunately OpenID support in the Drupal CMS we're using to build the site is simply not ready for prime time. Still, I'm working to improve this and hope to offer OpenID logins in 1-2 weeks. - 'Mummi' Thorisson

what kind of troubles are appearing? openid module for drupal 5 is pretty stable, and is in core for drupal 6 - Mike Chelen

It's been a couple of days, but from what I understand the site mentions the OpenID as the actual identifier. "Hi, I'm http://jandot.myopenid.com". All nice, until for some reason you decide that you don't want to use that OpenID provider any more. Then we end up with the same issue as with the email-as-identifier on papers: non-identifiable authors... - Jan Aerts

Mike - the core module in Drupal works in principle in many cases, sure. But there's no provision for helping users enter their identifier, they have to enter the entire URL which is a no-no usability wise. So I'm working on a module which uses this one: http://jvance.com/pages.... The auto-registration mechanism doesn't work for e.g. Google's directed identity. Plus a few more niggles. - 'Mummi' Thorisson

Jan - what seems pretty certain is that we'll have a permanent, unique contributor ID which is specific to the publishing side of things. But what I see OpenID (or Shibboleth, or other) doing is acting as the mechanism for authenticating to CrossRef's service and publishers' manuscript-tracking systems. If you switch to another OpenID provider, you just associate your new OpenID with your contributor profile and disable the other one. - 'Mummi' Thorisson

..and (as Geoffrey Bilder mentioned when I spoke with at a meeting earlier in the week), if one can associate any number of identities with your profile, that would make the system more resilient. Say if you can have a primary OpenID, another secondary OpenID, a Shibboleth identity from your institution. And a regular username/password as well, in case all the federated services disappear! - 'Mummi' Thorisson