Administrator's Blog

Here is a recent paper on author name disambiguation, a topic briefly covered on this page on our website and also discussed on FriendFeed:

Enserink. Scientific publishing. Are you ready to become a number? Science (2009) vol. 323 (5922) doi:10.1126/science.323.5922.1662

An interesting point I want to highlight, where they bring up Crossref's planned ContributorID service:

..Whenever a research team submits a manuscript, each member would include a ContributorID number, establishing an enduring link to the paper's DOI. If publishers have trouble selling scientists on the system's benefits, such as doing away with a multitude of login data, they could bring out a stick: You can't publish without a number...

The proverbial 'stick' would optimally be supplemented with its close cousin, the proverbial 'carrot'. Something along the ones of 'Dear author. Here's this wonderful new ID system that you, well, have to use if you want to publish with us. If you wanna use a regular username/password, fine, that'll work. But, look, if you use this new thing called OpenID with the system, things will go a lot smoother, plus you can all these other interesting things with it as well!'

So, what I am hoping for here is that the ContributorID system will support the use of OpenID and friends as the preferred mechanism for authors to sign in to publishers' online manuscript-tracking systems, in particular to enable authors to share profile information securely. Could help massively to speed up OpenID adoption in the community.