Over the holidays I set up my own web presence both to be able to put more content and tools up and also to explore how I present myself as a scientist on the web. In a Semantic Web world where I am represented by a URL, what should that URL look like?

There has been some debate going backwards and forwards over the past few weeks about licensing, peoples expectations, and the extent to which researchers can be expected to understand, or want to understand, the details of legal terms, licensing and other technical minutiae. It is reasonable for scientific researchers not to wish to get into the details.

I am speaking at the Eduserv Symposium on London in late May on the subject of the importance of identity systems for advancing the open research agenda. From the announcement: The Eduserv Symposium 2009 will be held on Thursday 21st May 2009 at the Royal College of Physicians, London.

Following on from my post last month about using OpenID as a way of identifying individual researchers,  Chris Rusbridge made the sensible request that when conversations go spreading themselves around the web it would be good if they could be summarised and aggregated back together. Here I am going to make an attempt to do that – but I won’t claim that this is a completely unbiased account.

I love Stephen Sondheim musicals. In particular I love the way he can build an ensemble piece in which there can be 10-20 people onstage, apparently singing, shouting, and speaking complete disconnected lines, which nonetheless build into a coherent whole.

Following on from Science Online 09 and particularly discussions on Impact Factors and researcher incentives (also on Friendfeed and some video available at Mogulus via video on demand) as well as the article in PloS Computational Biology by Phil Bourne and Lynn Fink the issue of unique researcher identifiers has really emerged as absolutely central to making traditional publication work better,

Image via Wikipedia Once again a range of conversations in different places have collided in my feed reader. Over on Nature Networks, Martin Fenner posted on Researcher ID which lead to a discussion about attribution and in particular Martin’s comment that there was a need to be able to link to comments and the necessity of timestamps.

Image via Wikipedia This has taken me longer than expected to write up. Julius Lucks, John Cumbers, and myself lead a workshop on Open Science on Monday 21 ^st at the BioSysBio meeting at Imperial College London.Â

Image by davemc500hats via Flickr One thing that has been becoming clearer and clearer to me is the need to an agreed central authority for identify. This is one thing, possibly the one thing, that needs to be absolutely secure and inviolable for Open Science to work. Trust relies on provenance. Attribution, which is at the heart of open practice, relies on provenance.