Home > Meetings & Conferences, Science Online, Standards > Breakout 3: Author identity – Creating a new kind of reputation online (Science Online London 2009)

Breakout 3: Author identity – Creating a new kind of reputation online (Science Online London 2009)

Duncan Hull, Geoffrey Bilder, Michael Habib, Reynold Guida

ResearcherID, Contributor ID, Scopus Author ID, etc. help to connect your scientific record. How do these tools connect to your online identity, and how can OpenID and other tools be integrated? How can we build an online reputation and when should we worry about our privacy?

Geoff Bilder:

Almost every aspect of a person can change without the person themselves changing. So, you want to have an identifier that is a hook to you, and which is better than a name (which is changeable). What about retinal scans? Fingerprints? OpenID? Where does your profile come in? A profile is a collection of attributes that you use to describe who you are. With author identity, what we want is the ability to get at the profile of a person in an unambiguous manner. Until we have such a thing, how do you tell people what your canonical profile is? To complicate matters even more, each user will want multiple personas, each with their own profiles.

When talking about identity, two issues are often conflated: identity authentication and knowledge discovery identity system. That is, you must be more rigorous in determining swho someone is (logging into your identity) than in figuring out who wrote a paper. Further complications occur in the lossy conversion between languages of authors’ names.

Whatever is done, has to be done on an international scale, must be interdisciplinary, and must be interinstitutional. The oldest content cited thus far in CrossRef (with a DOI) is from the 1600s. What happens when you die to your identifier? A final issue is scale: there are about 200K new DOIs per month, and even if we guess at 5 authors per DOI, then there could be between 5-21K failures of identification per month if you estimate a 96-97% success rate for author identification.

Duncan Hull:

He spoke about openID is science, among other things. Currently, authentication of people is very different in most online applications, and is generally only done with a simple username and password combination. Simon Willison (The Guardian) estimates that the average online user has at least 18 user accounts and 3.49 passwords. OpenID is trying to end up with a situation where there are fewer usernames AND passwords.

OpenID works by redirecting you to your openID provider to log in, then sends you back to the location you started at. However, having a URL as a username is not very intuitive. Further, logging in via redirection can be confusing. Therefore while adoption of openId is growing, it may not properly take off until browsers and other vendors support it better. Mentioned myExperiment as something which accepts openId.

Michael Habib:

Michael presented a nice diagram: a square divided into 4 parts, with “about me” and “not about me” across the top, and “by me” and “not by me” down the side. It is the “not” category for both where the disambiguation of people is the most important. He used the example of Einstein and the LC Authority Files to figure out what all of the different versions of his name are.

Completely different from the LC Authority files, which is manually and carefully checked by only certain people, is ClaimID. ClaimID is a way to collect all aspects of your identity in one place. However, it is dependent upon each individual being truthful about what they have ownership over.

Another approach is the Scopus Author ID, which is completely machine aggregated. It is validated by publications, and scales well. It has 99% precision and 95% recall. The cons is that it is impersonal, and those precision and recall values really aren’t very good when you consider that this is about ownership of an article, and that there are a very large number of people.

There is also 2collab, where you can combine author ids (that you know about) into one identity. Then, you can add any other item on the web that is about you.

Reynold Guida (from Thomson Reuters):

They’ve built software to try to address author identity and attribution. If you look at the literature since 2000, communication and scientific collaboration has really changed. What we notice is that the number of multi-author papers has started to increase, while single-author papers have decreased. A google search for common surnames really highlights the problems associated with identity. Name ambiguity is a real problem. The connection between the reseacher and the institution and the community is a real problem. Two of the most important parts in this discussion are who do I know, and who do I want to know? The connections a person makes affects all aspects of their career.

Therefore they have created researcherId (free, secure, open). Privacy options are controlled by the user, even if the institution created the record. There is integration with EndNote, Web of Knowledge, and other systems to help build publication lists. You can link to / visualize your researcher id profile really easily from your own websites.

Discussion:

Question: Has anyone thought through the security implications of these single ID systems: one slip-up and your entire identity has been hacked? GB: Multiple identities encourages poor behaviour, as the thought of changing your password everywhere is so overwhelming that people don’t do it. But yes, these problems exist. However, the tradeoffs make it worthwhile to their minds. You should NOT conflate knowledge issues with security issues. This is because information for your scholarly profile is, by definition, public anyway.

Question: Do different openId providers and author id and researcher id know about each other in the computational sense? Not really yet.

Question: What about just making the markup of the web more semantically friendly? DH: The Google approach is a good one. RG: It’s all about getting the information into the workflow.

Question (Phil Lord): What worries me is that there has been a big land grab for author identity space: for example, you cannot log into Yahoo with any other open id than a Yahoo open id. There’s a lot of value in being in control of someone’s id. Therefore there is a big potential danger. GB: For every distributed system, you need a centralized indexing thing to get it to work correctly. Therefore we need to make sure that if a centralized system appears, there should be accountability.

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Please note that this post is merely my notes on the presentation. They are not guaranteed to be correct, and unless explicitly stated are not my opinions. They do not reflect the opinions of my employers. Any errors you can happily assume to be mine and no-one else’s. I’m happy to correct any errors you may spot – just let me know!

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