Hi Brian, thanks for the comments and the pointers. I think the community of interested people split a bit on this point of institutional arrangements. Some (including myself) believe it should be divorced entirely from the institution whereas others feel that is the most important filter. My feeling is that it is important not to rule people out - many important contributors may not be conventional professional researchers but working in other places (industry etc) or not working at all (contributors to e.g. environmental datasets can quite frequently be amateurs with no professional connection to anything that could be described as a "research" organisation - see also Galaxy Zoo).

I guess my central point is that none of this should stop institutions offering OpenIDs (or any other agreed identity token) - anyone can provide an ID and somesort of whitelist (or perhaps greylist) approach could be workable. But at the end of the day, should a journal/database really care where a contribution comes from - surely it is the quality of the research that matters? Most of the time a quick glance at the content can rule out nonsense - and plenty of nonsense comes from respected institutions anyway

But the point about getting in touch with providers and the OpenID groups is a good one if this should get off the ground.