A specialist OpenID service to provide unique researcher IDs

I was going to write a post re: this epic Friendfeed thread (and Cameron's original post) but then Geoff Bilder left some comments that pretty much covered everything:

Let me just address a few points:

a) Yes, CrossRef is exploring this space.
b) For those afraid of CrossRef being in the thrall of "traditional publishers", I will note CrossRef members include PLOS, PubMed Central, The Encyclopedia of Life, Hindawi, Jove, OECD, World Bank, some IRs... In short, we are catholic in our definition of "publisher". I should also note that we are a non-profit. When/if we charge for things, it is only so that we can sustain the service.
c) It is true that CrossRef could go under. Any place could go under. But because so many depend on us already, a central concern of our members is to make arrangements so that we can pass-on data and systems should something happen.
d) CrossRef is looking for something that will work across disciplines. We represent the sciences, social sciences, humanities, etc.
e) Cameron is right- the author ID problem is "much bigger than publishers". We are talking to researchers, librarians, funding agencies, etc. about what they would require from a service. We were at the CNI meeting and Cliff Lynch is on our advisory board and is aware of our project.
f) We too see OpenID is a critical component of the system, but we don't think OpenID and the Contributor ID are one and the same. As Richard says, OpenIDs are pretty fragile. There are also complicating issues that would arise from multiple institutional affiliations, etc. (OpenID delegation is only a geek solution to this).
g) Gumunder described our approach pretty well. We envision creating a repository of profiles. People could use open-ids (they might have a few) or shibboleth ids to authenticate with the service in order to edit their profiles. OAuth and MicroID might be used for other aspects of the service (e.g. profile exchange, blog signing)

I'm definitely up for getting off the ground quick and fast - and arguably the big disadvantage of CrossRef is that it's not always very good at that simply because it represents so many interests - but basically they're the people best placed to do this and they have the will and technical ability to see it through. Why compete when you can cooperate?

You could still start small, be unafraid to fail and try things out before any CrossRef sanctioned solution arrives though. It might be cool (and useful) to see unique author IDs across particular datasets or disciplines and if things were set up properly you could potentially just import the unique author ID / person pairs into CrossRef later to help seed the system.

CrossRef metadata for all!

(via Code4Lib) CrossRef currently has a competition running. Submit a proposal for an innovative service that uses CrossRef data and if you're selected you can get an account for free (giving you access to the CrossRef database, which normally costs $$$).

In case you haven't heard of CrossRef:

CrossRef's specific mandate is to be the citation linking backbone for all scholarly information in electronic form. CrossRef is a collaborative reference linking service that functions as a sort of digital switchboard. It holds no full text content, but rather effects linkages through Digital Object Identifiers (DOI), which are tagged to article metadata supplied by the participating publishers. The end result is an efficient, scalable linking system through which a researcher can click on a reference citation in a journal and access the cited article.

Simplistically, CrossRef can supply the basic metadata (title, authors, journal details) associated with DOIs from the scientific literature.

In case you haven't heard of DOIs: DOIs are unique, resolvable identifiers for digital content (papers or figures, for example..). This paper has DOI 10.1186/1743-422X-4-67 . If you go to the CrossRef homepage and enter that string into the DOI resolver you'll be redirected to wherever the owner of the DOI (BioMedCentral, in this case) says the paper currently resides.

An example of how this data is used: when a paper is published the references at the bottom of the page can be hyperlinked by doing a reverse lookup on the CrossRef database i.e. asking 'what's the DOI of the paper with this title and author list'?

Another example: imagine a scholarly bookmarking system like Connotea or Zotero. When somebody bookmarks a paper you could scrape the title, authors, etc. directly from the HTML and hope that it doesn't break, or you could just scrape the DOI and then get all of the other metadata from CrossRef.

I think the competition is a good idea. My only problem with it is that IMHO CrossRef data should be free for non-commercial use anyway. At the moment it sorta kinda is; there's a 'demo' interface which you can use to try the service out.

If CrossRef really want to encourage innovative uses of their data then they should open up the database to anybody who wants to build (free, publicly accessible) applications on top of it.

Sure, CrossRef costs money to run but surely more people and open systems using DOIs in turn make it more worthwhile for publishers or software vendors to sign up as commercial members?

In any case if you've got a brilliant biomedical mashup in mind that might benefit you should apply. The deadline for proposals is July 15th.