CrossTech

OCLC has published a report (PDF) identifying some requirements for what they call a "Cooperative Identities Hub". A quick glance through it seems to show that the use cases focus on what we are calling the "Knowledge Discovery" use cases. As I mentioned in my interview with Martin Fenner, there is also a category of "authentication" use cases that I think needs to be addressed by a contributor identifier system. Still, this is a good report that highlights many of the complexities that an identifier system needs to address.

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 3:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Martin Fenner continues his interest in the subject of author identifiers. He recently posted an online poll asking people some specific questions about how they would like to see an author identifier implemented.^*

The results of the poll are in and, though the sample was very small, the results are interesting. The responses are both gratifying -there seems to be a general belief that CrossRef has a roll to play here- and perplexing -most think the identifier needs to identify other "contributors" to the scholarly communications process- yet there seems to be a preference for the moniker "digital author identifier". This latter preference is certainly a surprise to us as we had been focusing our efforts on identifying analog authors. The only "digital authors" I know of are this one at at MIT and possibly this one at Aberystwyth University. ;-)

Anyway, There are some additional reactions to Martin's poll on FriendFeed.

Finally, I should have blogged about this earlier, but the March issue of Science included a summary of the initiatives and discussions surrounding the creation of an industry "author identifier" in an article titled “Are You Ready to Become a Number” (http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.323.5922.1662).

In pointing people at this, I feel like I must make a clarification to the article. In short, I don't think any of our publisher members would "force" anybody to use an author identifier whether it came from CrossRef or from anybody else. Though it is likely that in the interview I used the terms "carrot" and "stick", in truth publisher's would, instead of "a stick", at most wield a Nerf bat. Having said that, the essential point remains- even if most major publishers *strongly* encouraged all of their authors to use the system, it would take several years before the system had a critical mass of data.

^*Note that I deliberately didn't point CrossTech readers at this poll as it was being conducted because I thought doing so might introduce a CrossRef bias.

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 3:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Discussions around "contributor Ids" (aka "Author ID, Researcher ID, etc.) seem to be becoming quite popular. In the interview that I pointed to in my last post, I mentioned that CrossRef has been talking with a group of researchers who were very interested in creating some sort of authenticated contributor ID as a mechanism for controlling who gets trusted access to sensitive genome-wide aggregate genotype data.

Well, I'm delighted to say that said group of researchers(at the GEN2PHEN project) have created a "Researcher Identification Primer" website in which they outline the many use-cases and issues around creating a mechanism for unambiguously identifying and/or authenticating researchers. This looks like a great resource and I expect it will serve as a useful focus for further discussion around the issue.

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 7:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The recently discussed (announced?) Google Knol project could make Google Scholar look like a tiny blip in the the scholarly publishing landscape.

I love the comment an authority:

"Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content."

And so I suppose this means they are assigning author identifiers....

Posted by at 8:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Was reminded to blog about this after reading Lorcan's post on the Names Project being run by JISC. From the blurb:

"The project is going to scope the requirements of UK institutional and subject repositories for a service that will reliably and uniquely identify names of individuals and institutions.
 
It will then go on to develop a prototype service which will test the various processes involved. This will include determining the data format, setting up an appropriate database, mapping data from different sources, populating the database with records and testing the use of the data."

Posted by Tony Hammond at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On the subject of author IDs (a subject CrossRef is interested in and on which held a meeting earlier this year, as blogged about here), this post by Karen Coyle "Name authority control, aka name identification" may be worth a read. She starts off with this:

"Libraries do something they call "name authority control". For most people in IT, this would be called "assigning unique identifiers to names." Identifying authors is considered one of the essential aspects of library cataloging, and it isn't done in any other bibliographic environment, as far as I know."

"Perhaps the days of looking at lists of authors' names is over. Maybe users need to see a cloud of authors connected to topic areas in which they have published, or related to books titles or institutional affiliations. In this time of author abundance, names are not meaningful without some context."

Posted by Tony Hammond at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)