Brian, I don't have direct contact with research institutions pushing on this (our effort is much more bottom up than that) but two groups in the UK worth talking to are Eduserv and UKOLN, who lead on a lot of these kind of issues in the UK and could at least point you in the right direction.

Some journals are looking at at least allowing the use of an OpenID as an identity marker - but the conclusion on that is likely to take a little while. Another person definitely worth contacting would be Phil Bourne (editor at PLoS Comp Biol) and author of the article I referenced in the post.

Finally another group worth contacting would be those people running online services, particularly those that are using OpenID for authentication. MyExperiment in the UK is the one I know the most about but adoption is growing amongst other services I believe.