Knowledgespeak, 07 Dec 2009
Various members of the research community have announced their intent to collaborate to resolve the existing author name ambiguity problem in scholarly communication. Together, the group hopes to develop an open, independent identification system for scholarly authors. This follows the first Name Identifier Summit held last month in Cambridge, MA, by Thomson Reuters and Nature Publishing Group, where a cross-section of the research community explored approaches to address name ambiguity. A follow-on meeting of this group took place in London last week to discuss the next steps.
Accurate identification of researchers and their work is seen as key for the transition from science to e-science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the growing volume of scholarly literature. A disambiguated set of authors will allow new services and benefits to be built for the research community by all stakeholders in scholarly communication: from commercial actors to non-profit organisations, from governments to universities.
The organisations that have agreed to work together to overcome the contributor identification issue include: American Institute of Physics, American Psychological Association, Association for Computing Machinery, British Library, CrossRef, Elsevier, European Molecular Biology Organisation, Hindawi, INSPIRE (project of CERN, DESY, Fermilab, SLAC), Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, Nature Publishing Group, Public Library of Science, ProQuest, SAGE Publications Inc., Springer, Thomson Reuters, University College London, University of Manchester (JISC Names Project), University of Vienna, Wellcome Trust and Wiley-Blackwell.
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