I am speaking at the Eduserv Symposium on London in late May on the subject of the importance of identity systems for advancing the open research agenda.

From the announcement:

The Eduserv Symposium 2009 will be held on Thursday 21st May 2009 at the Royal College of Physicians, London. More details about the event are available from: http://www.eduserv.org.uk/events/esym09

This symposium will be of value to people with an interest in the impact that the social Web is having on research practice and scholarly communication and the resulting implications for identity and access management. Attendees will gain an insight into the way the research landscape is evolving and will be better informed when making future decisions about policy or practice in this area.

Confirmed speakers include: James Farnhill, Joint Information Systems Committee; Nate Klingenstein, Internet2; Cameron Neylon, Science and Technology Facilities Council; Mike Roch, University of Reading; David Smith, CABI; John Watt, National e-Science Centre (Glasgow).

I’ve just written the abstract and title for my talk and will in time honored fashion be preparing the talk “just in time” so will try to make it as up to the minute as possible. Any comments or suggestions are welcome and the slides will be available on slideshare as soon as I have finalized them (probably just after I give the talk…)

Oh, you’re that “Cameron Neylon”: Why effective identity management is critical to the development of open research

There is a growing community developing around the need make the outputs of research available more efficiently and more effectively. This ranges from efforts to improve the quality of data presentation in published peer reviewed papers through to efforts where the full record of research is made available online, as it is recorded. A major fear as more material goes online in different forms is that people will not receive credit for their contribution. The recognition of researcher’s contribution has always focussed on easily measurable quantities. As the diversity of measurable contributions increases there is a growing need to aggregate the contributions of a specific researcher together in a reliable and authoritative way. The key to changing researcher behaviour lies in creating a reward structure that acknowledges their contribution and allows them to effectively cited. Effective mechanisms for uniquely identifying researchers are therefore at the heart of constructing reward systems that support an approach to research that fully exploits the communication technologies available to us today.