Cameron Neylon

Following on from my [post last
month](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/a-specialist-openid-service-to-provide-unique-researcher-ids/)
about using [OpenID](http://openid.net) as a way of identifying
individual researchers,Â  [Chris
Rusbridge](http://digitalcuration.blogspot.com/) 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 will try to point to
as much of the conversation as possible but if I miss things out or
misprepresent something please correct me in the comments or the [usual
places](http://friendfeed.com/cameronneylon).

The majority of the conversation around my post occured on friendfeed,
at [the item
here](http://friendfeed.com/e/c1fd00ec-15f9-d894-4ea9-4ffeaac5ae28/A-specialist-OpenID-service-to-provide-unique/),
but also see commentary around Jan Aert's
[post](http://saaientist.blogspot.com/2009/01/who-o-o-are-you-who-who-who-who.html)
(and [friendfeed
item](http://friendfeed.com/e/cf559daf-90c4-4613-9fe7-b27ca3dbf1a7/Who-o-o-are-you-Who-who-Who-who/))
and Bjoern Bremb's [summary
post](http://bjoern.brembs.net/news.php?item.495.5). Other commentary
included posts from [Andy
Powell](http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2009/01/openids-researchers-and-delegation.html)
(Eduserv), [Chris
Leonard](http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/blogs/pmcblog/entry/some_thoughts_on_unique_author)
(PhysMathCentral),
[Euan](http://www.ghastlyfop.com/blog/2009/01/specialist-openid-service-to-provide.html),
[Amanda
Hill](http://namesproject.wordpress.com/2009/01/22/a-flurry-of-author-id-discussions/)
of the [Names project](http://names.mimas.ac.uk/), and [Paul
Walk](http://blog.paulwalk.net/2009/01/22/openid-and-name-authority/)
(UKOLN). There was also a [related
article](http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=405184&c=1)
in Times Higher Education discussing the
[article](http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000247)
(Bourne and Fink) in PLoS Comp Biol that kicked a lot of this off \[Ed
-- Duncan Hull also pointed out there is a parallel discussion about the
ethics of IDs that I haven't kept up with -- see the [commentary at the
PLoS Comp Biol
paper](http://www.ploscompbiol.org/annotation/getCommentary.action?target=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000247)
for examples\]. [David
Bradley](http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/) also pointed out to
me a [post he
wrote](http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/paperid-an-open-source-identifier-for-research-papers.html)
some time ago which touches on some of the same issues although from a
different angle. [Pierre](http://plindenbaum.blogspot.com) set up [a
page on
OpenWetWare](http://openwetware.org/wiki/Biogang:Discussion/UniqueAuthorID)
to aggregate material to, and [Martin
Fenner](http://network.nature.com/people/mfenner/blog/) has a collected
set of [bookmarks with the tag authorid at
Connotea](http://www.connotea.org/tag/authorid).

The first point which seems to be one of broad agreement is that there
is a clear need for some form of unique identifier for researchers. This
is not necessarily as obvious as it might seem. With many of these
proposals there is significant push back from communities who don't see
any point in the effort involved. I haven't seen any evidence of that
with this discussion which leads me to believe that there is broad
support for the idea from researchers, informaticians, publishers,
funders, and research managers. There is also strong agreement that any
system that works will have to be credible and trustworthy to
researchers as well as other users, and have a solid and sustainable
business model. Many technically minded people pointed out that building
something was easy -- getting people to sign up to use it was the hard
bit.

Equally, and here I am reading between the lines somewhat, any workable
system would have to be well designed and easy to use for researchers.
There was much backwards and forwards about how "RDF is too hard", "you
can't expect people to generate FOAF" and "OpenID has too many technical
problems for widespread uptake". Equally people thinking about what the
back end would have to look like to even stand a chance of providing an
integrated system that would work felt that FOAF, RDF, OAuth, and OpenID
would have to provide a big part of the gubbins. The message for me was
that the way the user interface(s) is presented have to be got right.
There are small models of aspects of this that show that easy interfaces
can be built to capture sophisticated data, but getting it right at
scale will be a big challenge.

Where there is less agreement is on the details, both technical and
organisational of how best to go about creating a useful set of unique
identifiers. There was some to-and-fro as to whether CrossRef was the
right organisation to manage such a system. Partly this turned on
concern over centralised versus distributed systems and partly over
issues of scope and trust. Nonetheless the majority view appeared to be
that CrossRef would be right place to start and CrossRef do seem to have
plans in this direction (from Geoffry Bilder see [this Friendfeed
item](http://friendfeed.com/e/c1fd00ec-15f9-d894-4ea9-4ffeaac5ae28/A-specialist-OpenID-service-to-provide-unique/)).

There was also a lot of discussion around identity *tokens* versus
*authorisation*. Overall it seemed that the view was that these can be
productively kept separate. One of the things that appealed to me in the
first instance was that OpenIDs could be used as either tokens (just a
unique code that is used as an identifier) as well as a login mechanism.
The machinery is already in place to make that work. Nonetheless it was
generally accepted, I think, that the first important step is an
identifier. Login mechansisms are not necessarily required, or even
wanted, at the moment.

The discussion as to whether OpenID is a good mechanism seemed in the
end to go around in circles. Many people brought up technical problems
they had with getting OpenIDs to work, and there are ongoing problems
both with the underlying services that support and build on the standard
as well as with the quality of some of the services that provide
OpenIDs. This was at the core of my original proposal to build a
specialist provider, that had an interface, and functionality that
worked for researchers. As [Bjoern pointed
out](http://bjoern.brembs.net/news.php?item.495.5), I should of course
be applying my own [five criteria for successful web
services](http://www.slideshare.net/CameronNeylon/social-networks-for-scientists)
(got to the last slide) to this proposal. Key questions: 1) can it offer
something compelling? Well no, not unless someone, somewhere requires
you to have this thing 2) can you pre-populate? Well yes, and maybe that
is the key...(see later). In the end, as with the concern over other
"informatics-jock" terms and approaches, the important thing is that all
of the technical side is invisible to end users.

Another important discussion, that again, didn't really come to a
conclusion, was who would pass out these identifiers? And when? Here
there seemed to be two different perspectives. Those who wanted the
identifiers to be completely separated from institutional associations,
at least at first order. Others seemed concerned that access to
identifiers be controlled via institutions. I definitely belong in the
first camp. I would argue that you just give them to everyone who
requests them. The problem then comes with duplication, what if someone
accidentally (or deliberately) ends up with two or more identities. At
one level I don't see that it matters to anyone except to the person
concerned (I'd certainly be trying to avoid having my publication record
cut in half). But at the very least you would need to have a good
interface for merging records when it was required. My personal belief
is that it is more important to allow people to contribute than to
protect the ground. I know others disagree and that somewhere we will
need to find a middle path.

One thing that was helpful was the fact that we seemed to do a pretty
good job of getting various projects in this space aggregated together
(and possibly more aware of each other). Among these is
[ResearcherID](http://researcherid.com), a commercial offering that has
been running for a while now, the [Names
project](http://names.mimas.ac.uk/), a collaboration of
[Mimas](http://mimas.ac.uk) and the [British Library](http://www.bl.uk)
funded by JISC, [ClaimID](http://claimid.com/) is an OpenID provider
that some people use that provides some of the flexible "home page"
functionality (see [Maxine Clark's](http://claimid.com/maxine) for
instance) that drove my original ideas,
[PublicationsList.org](http://publicationslist.org) provides an online
homepage but does what ClaimID doesn't, providing a
[PubMed](http://pubmed.org) search that makes it easier (as long as your
papers are in PubMed) to populate that home page with your papers (but
not easier to include datasets, blogs, or wikis -- see
[here](http://publicationslist.org/cameronneylon) for my attempts to
include a blog post on my page). There are probably a number of others,
feel free to point out what I've missed!

So finally where does this leave us? With a clear need for something to
be done, with a few organisations identified as the best ones to take it
forward, and with a lot of discussion required about the background
technicalities required. If you're still reading this far down the page
then you're obviously someone who cares about this. So I'll give my
thoughts, feel free to disagree!

1.  **We need an identity token, not an authorisation mechanism.**
    Authorisation can get easily broken and is technically hard to
    implement across a wide range of legacy platforms. If it is possible
    to build in the option for authorisation in the future then that is
    great but it is not the current priority.
2.  **The backend gubbins will probably be distributed RDF.** There is
    identity information all over the place which needs to be aggregated
    together. This isn't likely to change so a centralised database, to
    my mind, will not be able to cope. RDF is built to deal with these
    kinds of problems and also allows multiple potential identity tokens
    to be pulled together to say they represent one person.
3.  **This means that user interfaces will be crucial.** The simpler the
    better but the backend, with words like FOAF and RDF needs to be
    effectively invisible to the user. Very simple interfaces asking
    "are you the person who wrote this paper" are going to win, complex
    signup procedures are not.
4.  **Publishers and funders will have to lead.** The end view of what
    is being discussed here is very like a personal home page for
    researchers. But instead of being a home page on a server it is a
    dynamic document pulled together from stuff all over the web. But
    researchers are not going to be interested for the most part in
    having another home page that they have to look after. Publishers in
    particular understand the value (and will get most value out of in
    the short term) unique identifiers so with the most to gain and the
    most direct interest they are best placed to lead, probably through
    organisations like CrossRef that aggregate things of interest across
    the industry. Funders will come along as they see the benefits of
    monitoring research outputs, and forward looking ones will probably
    come along straight away, others will lag behind. The main point is
    that pre-populating and then letting researchers come along and
    prune and correct is going to be more productive than waiting for
    ten millions researchers to sign up to a new service.
5.  **The really big question is whether there is value in doing this
    specially for researchers**. This is not a problem unique to
    research and one in which a variety of messy and disparate solutions
    are starting to arise. Maybe the best option is to sit back and wait
    to see what happens. I often say that in most cases generic services
    are a better bet than specially built ones for researchers because
    the community size isn't there and there simply isn't a sufficient
    need for added functionality. My feeling is that for identity that
    there is a special need, and that if we capture the whole research
    community that it will be big enough to support a viable service.
    There is a specific need for following and aggregating the work of
    people that I don't think is general, and is different to the
    authentication issues involved in finance. So I think in this case
    it is worth building specialist services.

The best hope I think lies in individual publishers starting to
disambiguate authors across their existing corpus. Many have already put
a lot of effort into this. In turn, perhaps through CrossRef, it should
be possible to agree an arbitrary identifier for each individual author.
If this is exposed as a service it is then possible to start linking the
information up. People can and will and the services will start to grow
around that. Once this exists then some of the ideas around recognising
referees and other efforts will start to flow.


Following on from my post last month about using OpenID as a way of identifying individual researchers,Â  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.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Contributor IDs – an attempt to aggregate and integrate