Editorial in Nature Genetics, suggesting the use DOIs for datasets.

..data still remain someone's life work to be bartered in an economy of knowledge production. The value of research publications is currently acknowledged by citation. If this practice of citation is extended to datasets, these datasets and their producers will be properly recognized. 

Useful introduction to federated identity management: 

http://www.educause.edu/Resources/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutFeder/179330

Identity management refers to the policies, processes, and technologies that establish user identities and enforce rules about access to digital resources. With an enterprise identity management system, rather than having separate credentials for each system, a user can use a single digital identity to access all resources to which the user is entitled. Federated identity management permits extending this approach above the enterprise level, creating a trusted authority for digital identities across multiple organizations. It results in greatly simplified administration and streamlined access to resources; eliminating the need to replicate databases of user credentials for separate applications and systems offers improved security. Federated identity management puts the focus on users of information and services rather than on entities that house those resources.

Looks like further advances are being made to make the OpenID signin procedure smoother for users, following in the footsteps of previous experiments by Plaxo on this front. The mini-popup actually works surprisingly well, compared to complete browser redirect to the ID provider site, and the two-in-one (signin + approve data sharing) approach certainly is smooth (after testing my Yahoo ID on http://www.mysears.com).

http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/09/yahoo_openid_hybrid.html

...
Building on their successful experience with Yahoo! OpenID, Plaxo is experimenting with the Hybrid Protocol: A portion of new users who sign up for Plaxo with their Yahoo! account, are now enabled to sign in to Plaxo with their Yahoo! account and to authorize two-way data sharing of their Yahoo! Contacts and Updates via the Hybrid Protocol.
... 

From http://sazbean.com/2008/06/16/oauth-and-openid-trust-is-in-vogue/ 

Without knowing it, my father has skillfully summed up a crisis we are facing online. ‘I have too many $#@%ing passwords’ he told me the other day ‘Just email them to me’. We had just uploaded our latest series of pictures starring his granddaughter. ‘Dad, its real easy. All you need to do is get a Flickr account. Tell me the account name and I’ll share my pictures with the account. Then you can login and look at them online’ I said as if I had just solved all of his problems. But, as I mentioned earlier, he has too many passwords. Too many accounts to remember. Too many places that want the same pieces of personal information over and over again. When he visits he brings his own camera.
[...]
What if my Father had an account at Google for his mail. If Yahoo trusted Google, it could ask Google to “log in” my father so that he could get into the Yahoo owned Flickr site and see his granddaughters pictures. His personal information, including his password, would be housed on Google only. The identity he uses to login could be his Google account or can be related back to his personal blog account or his personal domain name. His identity would remain static. This is the basic idea behind OpenID.
[...]
Authentication usually has a “on or off” connotation. You are either allowed in or you are not. That need not be the case. Taking the idea of trust relationships further, we imagine using the OpenId model to ask for permission to use services on another site. Take, for example, My father logged into Flickr through his Google OpenID. Now Flickr wants to email out a picture to each of his friends on his email address book. My dad could put all those email addresses into Flickr, but he wouldn’t like it. What if Flickr could use the OpenID trust relationship to ask Google to share dad’s address book. As long as Dad was prompted to provide his password, Flickr itself could be granted limited authorization into google to use dad’s Gmail address book. This is the idea behind OAuth.