I came across this interesting identity "mashup" demo, after seeing it highlighted by Kim Cameron on his Identity Blog last month. From the original post on the Microsoft Developer network:

Sommer, J. The delay in sharing research data is costing lives. Nat Med (2010) vol. 16 (7) pp. 744. doi:10.1038/nm0710-744

It is not uncommon for potentially life-saving research data to be published years after being generated. But the setback to progress caused by the delay in releasing data is troublesome for people who selflessly participate in trials and desperately await new therapies. Scientists need to feel greater urgency to share their findings quickly, and they need additional avenues to facilitate this process.

Martin Fenner put up an informative blog post on Nature Network recently, summarising his ideas for the way forward on the author ID front: 

http://network.nature.com/people/mfenner/blog/2010/01/03/orcid-or-how-to-build-a-unique-identifier-for-scientists-in-10-easy-steps

Excellent news on the researcher/contributor ID front!

From http://www.crossref.org/01company/orcid.html

CrossRef is pleased to announce that it will be participating in the recently launched Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) initiative to create an unambiguous identifier for scholarly and professional researchers. Our members will be aware that CrossRef has been exploring the possibility of creating an “author DOI” or “contributor ID” system. In doing so, it has become clear that the issues and use-cases involved in identifying researchers span a broad collection of stakeholders including libraries, institutions, funders, publishers and, of course researchers themselves. In short, this is not primarily “a publisher problem.” As such, we believe that the ORCID approach to creating an inclusive and open organization representing all the stakeholders in the scholarly communications process represents the best chance of creating a successful contributor identification system

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