Tag: identity

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Draft White Paper – Researcher identifiers

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On April 26 I am attending a joint meeting of the NSF and EuroHORCS (European Heads of Research Councils) on “Changing the Conduct of Science in the Information Age”. I have been asked to submit a one page white paper in advance of the meeting and have been struggling a bit with this. This is stage one, a draft document relating to researcher identifiers. I’m not happy with it but reckon that other people out there may well be able to help where I am struggling. I may write a second one on metrics or at least a brief literature collection. Any and all comments welcome.

Summary

Citation lies at the core of research practice, recognizing both the contributions that others have made in the development of a specific piece of work and in linking related knowledge together. The technology of the web make it technically feasible to radically improve the precision, accuracy, and completeness of these links. Such improvements are crucial to the successful implementation of any system that purports to measure research outputs or quality.

Additionally the web offers the promise of extended and distributed projects involving diverse parties, many of which may not be professional researchers. Nonetheless such contributions deserve the same level of recognition as comparable contributions from professional researchers. Providing an open system in which people can contribute to research efforts and receive credit raises significant social issues of control and validation of identities.

Such open systems and federated systems are exposed to potential failure through lack of technical expertise on the part of users, particularly where a person loses or creates a new identity. This in many ways is already the case where we use institutional email addresses as proxies for researcher identity. Is D.C.Neylon@####.ac.uk (a no longer functioning email address), the same person as Cameron.Neylon@####.ac.uk? It is technically feasible to consider systems in which the actual identity token used is widely available and compatible with the wider consumer web but centralised and trusted authorities provide validation services to confirm specific claims around identity. Such a broker or clearing house would provide a similar role for identities as CrossRef provides for scholarly articles via the DOI.

General points

  • By adding the concept of a semantic-web ready researcher identifier, i.e. an identifier that provides a URL endpoint that uniquely represents a specific researcher, the existing technical capacity of the semantic web stack can be used to provide a linked data representation of contributions to existing published research objects that are accessible at URL endpoints. Such a representation could be readily expanded beyond authorship to funder contributions.
  • Crediting a researcher as a contributor to a specific object published on the web is a specific form of citation or linking in this view
  • The authoring tools to support the linking and publishing of research objects in this form do not currently exist in a widely useable form.
  • Semantic web technology provides an extensible means to adding and recognising diverse forms of contribution.

Authorisation, validation, and control

  • Access to such identifiers must be under the control of the researcher and not limited to those with institutional affiliations. Any person must be able to obtain and control a unique researcher identifier that refers to them.
  • Authorisation and validation of claimed rights of access or connections to specific institutions can be technically handled separately from the provision of identifiers.

Technical and legal issues

  • OpenID and OAuth provide a developing internet standard that provides technical means to achieve a distributed availability of identifiers and to separate issues of authentication from those of identification. They are a current leader for federated identity and authorisation solutions on the consumer web.
  • OpenID and OAuth do not currently provide the levels of security required in several jurisdictions for personal or sensitive information (e.g. UK data protection act).  Such federated systems may fall foul of jurisdictions with strong generic privacy requirements, e.g. Canada
  • To interoperate with the wider web and enable a wider notion of citation as a declaration of a piece of knowledge “Person X authored Paper Y”, identities must resolve on the web, in the sense of being a clickable hyperlink that takes a human or machine reader to a page containing information representing that person.

Social issues

  • There are profound social issues of trust in the maintenance of such identifiers, especially for non-professional researchers in the longer term.
  • A centralised trusted authority (or authorities) that validates specific claims about identity (a “CrossRef for people”) might provide a trusted broker for identity transactions in the research space that solves many of these trust problems.
  • Issues around trust and jurisdiction as well as scope and control are likely to limit and fragment any effort to coordinate, federate, or integrate differing identity solutions in the research space. Therefore interoperability of any developed system with the wider web must be a prime consideration.

Conclusions

Identity, unique identifiers, authorisation of access and validation of claims are issues that need to be solved before any transparent and believable metric systems can be reliably implemented. In the current world ill-considered, non-transparent, and irreproducible metric systems will almost inevitably lead to legal claims. At the same time there is a massive opportunity for wider involvement in research for which a much more diverse range of people’s contributions will need recognition.

A system in which recognition and citation takes the form of a link to a specified address on the web that represents a person has the potential to simultaneously make it much easier to unambiguously confirm who is being credited but additionally provides the opportunity to leverage an existing stack of tools and services to aggregate and organize information relating to identity. This is in fact a specific example of a wider view of addressable research objects on the web that can be part of a web of linked data. In this view a person is simply another object that can have specified relationships (links) to other objects.

Partial technical solutions in the form of OAuth, and OpenID exist that solve some subset of these problems. However these systems are currently not technically secure to a level compatible with handling the transfer of sensitive data. However they can interoperate with more secure transfer systems. They provide a federated and open system that enables any person to obtain and assert an identity and to control the appearance of that identity. Severe social issues around trust and persistence exist for this kind of system. This may be addressed through trusted centralized repositories that can act as a reliable broker.

Given expected issues with uptake of any system, systems that are interoperable with competitive or complementary offerings are crucial.

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New Year – New me

FireworksApologies for any wierdness in your feed readers. The following is the reason why as I try to get things working properly again.

The past two years on this blog I wrote made some New Year’s resolutions and last year I assessed my performance against the previous year’s aims. This year I will admit to simply being a bit depressed about how much I achieved in real terms and how effective I’ve been at getting ideas out and projects off the ground. This year I want to do more in terms of walking the walk, creating examples, or at least lashups of the things I think are important.

One thing that has been going around in my head for at least 12 months is the question of identity. How I control what I present, who I depend on, and in the world of a semantic web where I am represented by a URL what should actually be there when someone goes to that address. So the positive thing I did over the holiday break, rather than write a new set of resolutions was to start setting up my own presence on the web, to think about what I might want to put there and what it might look like.

This process is not as far along as I would like but its far enough along that this will be the last post at this address. OpenWetWare has been an amazing resource for me over the past several years and we will continue to use the wiki for laboratory information and I hope to work with the team in whatever way I can as the next generation of tools develops. OpenWetWare was also a safe place where I could learn about blogging without worrying about the mechanics, confident in the knowledge that Bill Flanagan was covering the backstops. Bill is the person who has kept things running through the various technical ups and down and I’d particularly like to thank him for all his help.

However I have now learnt enough to be dangerous and want to try some more things out on my own. More than can be conveniently managed on a website that someone else has to look after. I will write a bit more about the idea and choices I’ve made in setting up the site soon but for the moment I just want to point you to the new site and offer you some choices about subscribing to different feeds.

If you are on the feedburner feed for the blog you should be automatically transferred over to the feed on the new site. If you’re reading in a feed reader you can check this by just clicking through to the item on my site. If you end up at a url starting https://cameronneylon.net/ then you are in the right place. If not, just change your reader to point at http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScienceInTheOpen.

This feed will include posts on things like papers and presentations as well as blog posts so if you are already getting that content in another stream and prefer to just get the blog posts via RSS you should point your reader at http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScienceInTheOpen_blog.  I can’t test this until I actually post something so just hold tight if it doesn’t work and I will try to get it working as soon as I can. The comments feed for all seven of you subscribed to it should keep working. All the posts are mirrored on the new site and will continue to be available at OpenWetWare

Once again I’d like to thank all the people at OpenWetWare that got me going in the blogging game and hope to see you over at the new site as I figure out what it means to present yourself as a scientist on the web.

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It’s not easy being clear…

There has been some debate going backwards and forwards over the past few weeks about licensing, peoples expectations, and the extent to which researchers can be expected to understand, or want to understand, the details of legal terms, licensing and other technical minutiae. It is reasonable for scientific researchers not to wish to get into the details. One of the real successes of Creative Commons has been to provide a relatively small set of reasonably clear terms that enable people to express their wishes about what people can do with their work. But even here there is the potential for significant confusion as demonstrated by the work that CC is doing on the perception of what “non commercial” means.

The end result of this is two-fold. Firstly people are genuinely confused about what to do and a result they give up. In giving up there is often an unspoken assumption that “people will understand what I want/mean”. Two examples yesterday illustrated exactly how misguided this can be and showed the importance of being clear, and thinking about, what you want people to do with your content and information.

The first was pointed out by Paulo Nuin who linked to a post on The Matrix Cookbook, a blog and PDF containing much useful information on matrix transforms. The post complained that Amazon were selling a Kindle version of the PDF, apparently without asking permission or even bothering to inform the authors. So far, so big corporation. But digging a little deeper I went to the front page of the site and found this interesting “license”:

“License? No, there is no license. It is provided as a knowledge sharing project for anyone to use. But if you use it in an academic or research like context, we would love to be cited appropriately.”

Now I would intepret this as meaning that the authors had intended to place the work in the public domain. They clearly felt that while educational and research re-use was fine that commercial use was not. I would guess that someone at Amazon read the statement “there is no license” and felt that it was free to re-use. It seems odd that they wouldn’t email the authors to notify them but if it were public domain there is no requirement to. Rude, yes. Theft? Well it depends on your perspective. Going back today the authors have made a significant change to the “license”:

It is provided as a knowledge sharing project for anyone to use. But if you use it in an academic or research like context, we would love to be cited appropriately. And NO, you are not allowed to make money on it by reselling The Matrix Cookbook in any form or shape.

Had the authors made the content CC-BY-NC then their intentions would have been much clearer. My personal belief is that an NC license would be counter-productive (meaning the work couldn’t be used for teaching at a fee charging college or for research funded by a commercial sponsor for instance) but the point of the CC licenses is to give people these choices. What is important is that people make those choices and make them clear.

The second example related to identity. As part of an ongoing discussion involving online commenting genereg, a Friendfeed user, linked to their blog which included their real name. Mr Gunn, the nickname used by Dr William Gunn online wrote a blog post in which he referred to genereg’s contribution by linking to their blog from their real name [subsequently removed on request]. I probably would have done the same, wanting to ascribe the contribution clearly to the “real person” so they get credit for it. Genereg objected to this feeling that as their real name wasn’t directly in that conversational context it was inappropriate to use it.

So in my view, “Genereg” was a nickname that someone was happy to have connected with their real name, while in their view this was inappropriate. No-one is right or wrong here, we are evolving the rules of conduct more or less as we go and frankly, identity is a mess. But this wasn’t clear to me or to Mr Gunn. I am often uncomfortable with trying to tell whether a specific person who has linked two apparently separate identities is happy with that link being public, has linked the two by mistake, or just regards one as an alias. And you can’t ask in public forum can you?

What links these, and this week’s other fracas, is confusion over people’s expectations. The best way to avoid this is to be as clear as you possibly can. Don’t assume that everyone thinks the same way that you do. And definitely don’t assume that what is obvious to you is obvious to everyone else. When it comes to content, make a clear statement of your expectations and wishes, preferably using a widely recognized and understood licenses. If you’re reading this at OWW you should be seeing my nice shiny new cc0 waiver in the right hand navbar (I haven’t figured how to get it into the RSS feed yet). Most of my slidesets at Slideshare are CC-BY-SA. I’d prefer them to be CC-BY but most include images with CC-BY-SA licenses which (try to make sure) I respect. Overall I try to make the work I generate as widely re-usable as possible and aim to make that as clear as possible.

There are no such tools to make clear statements about how you wish your identity to be treated (and perhaps there should be). But a plain english statement on the appropriate profile page might be useful “I blog under a pseudonym because…and I don’t want my identity revealed”…”Bunnykins is the Friendfeed handle of Professor Serious Person”. Consider whether what you are doing is sending mixed messages or potentially confusing. Personally I like to keep things simple so I just use my real name or variants of it. But that is clearly not for everyone.

Above all, try to express clearly what you expect and wish to happen. Don’t expect others necessarily to understand where you’re coming from. It is very easy for one person’s polite and helpful to be another person’s deeply offensive. When you put something online, think about how you want people to use it, think about how you don’t want people to use it (and remember you may need to balance the allowing of one against the restricting of the other) and make those as clear as you possibly can, where possible using a statement or license that is widely recognized and has had some legal attention at some point like the CC licenses, cc0 waiver, or the PDDL. Clarity helps everyone. If we get this wrong we may end up with a web full of things we can’t use.

And before anyone else gets in to tell me I’ve made plenty of unjustified, and plain wrong, assumptions about other people’s views before. Pot. Kettle. Black. Welcome to being human.

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Eduserv Symposium 2009 – Evolution or revolution: The future of identity and access management for research

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.

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Contributor IDs – an attempt to aggregate and integrate

Following on from my post last month about using OpenID as a way of identifying individual researchers,  Chris Rusbridge made the sensible request that when conversations go spreading themselves around the web it would be good if they could be summarised and aggregated back together. Here I am going to make an attempt to do that – but I won’t claim that this is a completely unbiased account. I will try to point to as much of the conversation as possible but if I miss things out or misprepresent something please correct me in the comments or the usual places.

The majority of the conversation around my post occured on friendfeed, at the item here, but also see commentary around Jan Aert’s post (and friendfeed item) and Bjoern Bremb’s summary post. Other commentary included posts from Andy Powell (Eduserv), Chris Leonard (PhysMathCentral), Euan, Amanda Hill of the Names project, and Paul Walk (UKOLN). There was also a related article in Times Higher Education discussing the article (Bourne and Fink) in PLoS Comp Biol that kicked a lot of this off [Ed – Duncan Hull also pointed out there is a parallel discussion about the ethics of IDs that I haven’t kept up with – see the commentary at the PLoS Comp Biol paper for examples]. David Bradley also pointed out to me a post he wrote some time ago which touches on some of the same issues although from a different angle. Pierre set up a page on OpenWetWare to aggregate material to, and Martin Fenner has a collected set of bookmarks with the tag authorid at Connotea.

The first point which seems to be one of broad agreement is that there is a clear need for some form of unique identifier for researchers. This is not necessarily as obvious as it might seem. With many of these proposals there is significant push back from communities who don’t see any point in the effort involved. I haven’t seen any evidence of that with this discussion which leads me to believe that there is broad support for the idea from researchers, informaticians, publishers, funders, and research managers. There is also strong agreement that any system that works will have to be credible and trustworthy to researchers as well as other users, and have a solid and sustainable business model. Many technically minded people pointed out that building something was easy – getting people to sign up to use it was the hard bit.

Equally, and here I am reading between the lines somewhat, any workable system would have to be well designed and easy to use for researchers. There was much backwards and forwards about how “RDF is too hard”, “you can’t expect people to generate FOAF” and “OpenID has too many technical problems for widespread uptake”. Equally people thinking about what the back end would have to look like to even stand a chance of providing an integrated system that would work felt that FOAF, RDF, OAuth, and OpenID would have to provide a big part of the gubbins. The message for me was that the way the user interface(s) is presented have to be got right. There are small models of aspects of this that show that easy interfaces can be built to capture sophisticated data, but getting it right at scale will be a big challenge.

Where there is less agreement is on the details, both technical and organisational of how best to go about creating a useful set of unique identifiers. There was some to-and-fro as to whether CrossRef was the right organisation to manage such a system. Partly this turned on concern over centralised versus distributed systems and partly over issues of scope and trust. Nonetheless the majority view appeared to be that CrossRef would be right place to start and CrossRef do seem to have plans in this direction (from Geoffry Bilder see this Friendfeed item).

There was also a lot of discussion around identity tokens versus authorisation. Overall it seemed that the view was that these can be productively kept separate. One of the things that appealed to me in the first instance was that OpenIDs could be used as either tokens (just a unique code that is used as an identifier) as well as a login mechanism. The machinery is already in place to make that work. Nonetheless it was generally accepted, I think, that the first important step is an identifier. Login mechansisms are not necessarily required, or even wanted, at the moment.

The discussion as to whether OpenID is a good mechanism seemed in the end to go around in circles. Many people brought up technical problems they had with getting OpenIDs to work, and there are ongoing problems both with the underlying services that support and build on the standard as well as with the quality of some of the services that provide OpenIDs. This was at the core of my original proposal to build a specialist provider, that had an interface, and functionality that worked for researchers. As Bjoern pointed out, I should of course be applying my own five criteria for successful web services (got to the last slide) to this proposal. Key questions: 1) can it offer something compelling? Well no, not unless someone, somewhere requires you to have this thing 2) can you pre-populate? Well yes, and maybe that is the key…(see later). In the end, as with the concern over other “informatics-jock” terms and approaches, the important thing is that all of the technical side is invisible to end users.

Another important discussion, that again, didn’t really come to a conclusion, was who would pass out these identifiers? And when? Here there seemed to be two different perspectives. Those who wanted the identifiers to be completely separated from institutional associations, at least at first order. Others seemed concerned that access to identifiers be controlled via institutions. I definitely belong in the first camp. I would argue that you just give them to everyone who requests them. The problem then comes with duplication, what if someone accidentally (or deliberately) ends up with two or more identities. At one level I don’t see that it matters to anyone except to the person concerned (I’d certainly be trying to avoid having my publication record cut in half). But at the very least you would need to have a good interface for merging records when it was required. My personal belief is that it is more important to allow people to contribute than to protect the ground. I know others disagree and that somewhere we will need to find a middle path.

One thing that was helpful was the fact that we seemed to do a pretty good job of getting various projects in this space aggregated together (and possibly more aware of each other). Among these is ResearcherID, a commercial offering that has been running for a while now, the Names project, a collaboration of Mimas and the British Library funded by JISC, ClaimID is an OpenID provider that some people use that provides some of the flexible “home page” functionality (see Maxine Clark’s for instance) that drove my original ideas, PublicationsList.org provides an online homepage but does what ClaimID doesn’t, providing a PubMed search that makes it easier (as long as your papers are in PubMed) to populate that home page with your papers (but not easier to include datasets, blogs, or wikis – see here for my attempts to include a blog post on my page). There are probably a number of others, feel free to point out what I’ve missed!

So finally where does this leave us? With a clear need for something to be done, with a few organisations identified as the best ones to take it forward, and with a lot of discussion required about the background technicalities required. If you’re still reading this far down the page then you’re obviously someone who cares about this. So I’ll give my thoughts, feel free to disagree!

  1. We need an identity token, not an authorisation mechanism. Authorisation can get easily broken and is technically hard to implement across a wide range of legacy platforms. If it is possible to build in the option for authorisation in the future then that is great but it is not the current priority.
  2. The backend gubbins will probably be distributed RDF. There is identity information all over the place which needs to be aggregated together. This isn’t likely to change so a centralised database, to my mind, will not be able to cope. RDF is built to deal with these kinds of problems and also allows multiple potential identity tokens to be pulled together to say they represent one person.
  3. This means that user interfaces will be crucial. The simpler the better but the backend, with words like FOAF and RDF needs to be effectively invisible to the user. Very simple interfaces asking “are you the person who wrote this paper” are going to win, complex signup procedures are not.
  4. Publishers and funders will have to lead. The end view of what is being discussed here is very like a personal home page for researchers. But instead of being a home page on a server it is a dynamic document pulled together from stuff all over the web. But researchers are not going to be interested for the most part in having another home page that they have to look after. Publishers in particular understand the value (and will get most value out of in the short term) unique identifiers so with the most to gain and the most direct interest they are best placed to lead, probably through organisations like CrossRef that aggregate things of interest across the industry. Funders will come along as they see the benefits of monitoring research outputs, and forward looking ones will probably come along straight away, others will lag behind. The main point is that pre-populating and then letting researchers come along and prune and correct is going to be more productive than waiting for ten millions researchers to sign up to a new service.
  5. The really big question is whether there is value in doing this specially for researchers. This is not a problem unique to research and one in which a variety of messy and disparate solutions are starting to arise. Maybe the best option is to sit back and wait to see what happens. I often say that in most cases generic services are a better bet than specially built ones for researchers because the community size isn’t there and there simply isn’t a sufficient need for added functionality. My feeling is that for identity that there is a special need, and that if we capture the whole research community that it will be big enough to support a viable service. There is a specific need for following and aggregating the work of people that I don’t think is general, and is different to the authentication issues involved in finance. So I think in this case it is worth building specialist services.

The best hope I think lies in individual publishers starting to disambiguate authors across their existing corpus. Many have already put a lot of effort into this. In turn, perhaps through CrossRef, it should be possible to agree an arbitrary identifier for each individual author. If this is exposed as a service it is then possible to start linking the information up. People can and will and the services will start to grow around that. Once this exists then some of the ideas around recognising referees and other efforts will start to flow.

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A funny thing happened on the (way to the) forum

I love Stephen Sondheim musicals. In particular I love the way he can build an ensemble piece in which there can be 10-20 people onstage, apparently singing, shouting, and speaking complete disconnected lines, which nonetheless build into a coherent whole. Into the Woods (1987) contains many brilliant examples of the thoughts, fears, and hopes of a whole group of people building into a coherent view and message (see the opening for a taste and links to other clips). Those who believe in the wisdom of crowds in its widest sense see a similar possibility in aggregating the chatter found on the web into coherent and accurate assessments of problems. Those who despair of the ignorance of the lowest common denominator see most Web2 projects as a waste of time. I sit somewhere in the middle – believing that with the right tools, a community of people who care about a problem and have some form of agreed standards of behavior and disputation can rapidly aggregate a well informed and considered view of a problem and what it’s solution might be.

Yesterday and today, I saw one of the most compelling examples of that I’ve yet seen. Yesterday I posted a brain dump of what I had been thinking about following discussions in Hawaii and in North Carolina, about the possibilities of using OpenID to build a system for unique researcher IDs. The discussion on Friendfeed almost immediately aggregated a whole set of material, some of which I had not previously seen, proceded through a coherent discussion of many points, with a wide range of disparate views, towards some emerging conclusions. I’m not going to pre-judge those conclusions except to note there are some positions clearly developing that are contrary to my own view (e.g. on CrossRef being the preferred organisation to run such a service). This to me suggests the power of this approach for concensus building, even when that concensus is opposite to the position of the person kicking off the discussion.

What struck me with this was the powerful way in which Friendfeed rapidly enabled the conversation – and also the potential negative effect it had on widening the conversation beyond that community. Friendfeed is a very powerful tool for very rapidly widening the reach of a discussion like this one. It would be interesting to know how many people saw the item in their feeds. I could calculate it I suppose but for now I will just guess it was probably in the low to mid thousands. Many, many, more than subscribe to the blog anyway. What will be interesting to see is whether the slower process of blogospheric diffusion is informed by the Friendfeed discussion or runs completely independent of it (incidentally Friendfeed widget will hopefully be coming soon on the blog as well to try to and tie things together). Andy Powell of the Eduserv Foundation comments in his post of today that;

There’s a good deal of discussion about the post in Cameron’s FriendFeed. (It’s slightly annoying that the discussion is somewhat divorced from the original blog post but I guess that is one of the, err…, features of using FriendFeed?) [Andy also goes on to make some good point about delegation – CN]

The speed with which Friendfeed works, and the way in which it helps you build an interested community, and  separated communities where appropriate, is indeed a feature of Friendfeed. Equally that speed and the fact that you need an account to comment, if not to watch, can be exclusionary. It is also somewhat closed off from the rest of the world. While I am greatly excited by what happened yesterday and today, indeed possibly just as excited as I am about yesterday’s other important news, it is important to make sure that the watering and care of the community doesn’t turn into the building of a walled garden.

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A specialist OpenID service to provide unique researcher IDs?

Following on from Science Online 09 and particularly discussions on Impact Factors and researcher incentives (also on Friendfeed and some video available at Mogulus via video on demand) as well as the article in PloS Computational Biology by Phil Bourne and Lynn Fink the issue of unique researcher identifiers has really emerged as absolutely central to making traditional publication work better, effectively building a real data web that works, and making it possible to aggregate the full list of how people contribute to the community automatically.

Good citation practice lies at the core of good science. The value of research data is not so much in the data itself but its context, its connection with other data and ideas. How then is it that we have no way of citing a person? We need a single, unique way, of identifying researchers. This will help traditional publishers and the existing ecosystem of services by making it possible to uniquely identify authors and referees. It will make it easier for researchers to be clear about who they are and what they have done. And finally it is a critical step in making it possible to automatically track all the contributions that people make. We’ve all seen CVs where people say they have refereed for Nature or the NIH or served on this or that panel. We can talk about micro credits but until there are validated ways of pulling that information and linking it to an identity that follows the person, not who they work for, we won’t make much progress.

On the other hand most of us do not want to be locked into one system, particularly if it is controlled by one commercial organization.  Thomson ISI’s ResearcherID is positioned as a solution to this problem, but I for one am not happy with being tied into using one particular service, regardless of who runs it.

In the PLoS Comp Biol article Bourne and Fink argue that one solution to this is OpenID. OpenID isn’t a service, it is a standard. This means that an identity can be hosted by a range of services and people can choose between them based on the service provided, personal philosophy, or any other reason. The central idea is that you have a single identity which you can use to sign on to a wide range of sites. In principle you sign into your OpenID and then you never see another login screen. In practice you often end up typing in your ID but at least it reduces the pain in setting up new accounts. It also provides in most cases a “home page”. If you go to http://cameron.neylon.myopenid.com you will see a (pretty limited) page with some basic information.

OpenID is becoming more popular with a wide range of webservices providing it as a login option including Dopplr, Blogger, and research sites including MyExperiment. Enabling OpenID is also on the list for a wide range of other services, although not always high up the priority list. As a starting point it could be very easy for researchers with an OpenID simply to add it to their address when publishing papers, thus providing a unique, and easily trackable identifier that is carried through the journal, abstracting services, and the whole ecosystem services built around them.

There are two major problems with OpenID. The first is that it is poorly supported by big players such as Google and Yahoo. Google and Yahoo will let you use your account with them as an OpenID but they don’t accept other OpenID providers. More importantly, people just don’t seem to get OpenID. It seems unnatural for some reason for a person’s identity marker to be a URL rather than a number, a name, or an email address. Compounded with the limited options provided by OpenID service providers this makes the practical use of such identifiers for researchers very much a minority activity.

So what about building an OpenID service specifically for researchers? Imagine a setup screen that asks sensible questions about where you work and what field you are in. Imagine that on the second screen, having done a search through literature databases it presents you with a list of publications to check through, remove any mistakes, allow you to add any that have been missed. And then imagine that the default homepage format is similar to an academic CV.

Problem 1: People already have multiple IDs and sometimes multiple OpenIDs. So we make at least part of the back end file format, and much of what is exposed on the homepage FOAF, making it possible to at least assert that you are the same person as, say cameronneylon@yahoo.com.

Problem 2: Aren’t we just locking people into a specific service again? Well no, if people don’t want to use it they can use any OpenID provider, even set one up themselves. It is an open standard.

Problem 3: What is there to make people sign up? This is the tough one really. It falls into two parts. Firstly, for those of us who already have OpenIDs or other accounts on other systems, isn’t this just (yet) another “me too” service. So, in accordance with the five rules I have proposed for successful researcher web services, there has to be a compelling case for using it.

For me the answer to this comes in part from the question. One of the things that comes up again and again as a complaint from researchers is the need to re-format their CV (see Schleyer et al, 2008 for a study of this). Remember that the aim here is to automatically aggregate most of the information you would put in a CV. Papers should be (relatively) easy, grants might be possible. Because we are doing this for researchers we know what the main categories are and what they look like. That is we have semantically structured data.

Ok so great I can re-format my CV easier and I don’t need to worry about whether it is up to date with all my papers but what about all these other sites where I need to put the same information? For this we need to provide functionality that lets all of this be carried easily to other services. Simple embed functionality like that you see on YouTube, and most other good file hosting services, which generates a little fragment of code that can easily be put in place on other services (obviously this requires other services to allow that – which could be a problem in some cases). But imagine the relief if all the poor people who try to manage university department websites could just throw in some embed codes to automatically keep their staff pages up to date? Anyone seeing a business model here yet?

But for this to work the real problem to be solved is the vast majority of researchers for whom this concept is totally alien. How do we get them to be bothered to sign up for this thing which apparently solves a problem they don’t have? The best approach would be if journals and grant awarding bodies used OpenIDs as identifiers. This would be a dream result but doesn’t seem likely. It would require significant work on changing many existing systems and frankly what is in it for them? Well one answer is that it would provide a mechanism for journals and grant bodies to publicly acknowledge the people who referee for them. An authenticated RSS feed from each journal or funder could be parsed and displayed on each researcher’s home page. The feed would expose a record of how many grants or papers that each person has reviewed (probably with some delay to prevent people linking that to the publication of specific papers). Of course such a feed could be used for lot of other interesting things as well, but none of them will work without a unique person identifier.

I don’t think this is compelling enough in itself, for the moment, but a simpler answer is what was proposed above – just encouraging people to include an OpenID as part of their address. Researchers will bend over backwards to make people happy if they believe those people have an impact on their chances of being published or getting a grant. A little thing could provide a lot of impetus and that might bring into play the kind of effects that could result from acknowledgement and ultimately make the case that shifting to OpenID as the login system is worth the effort. This would particularly the case for funders who really want to be able to aggregate information about the people they fund effectively.

There are many details to think about here. Can I use my own domain name (yes, re-directs should be possible). Will people who use another service be at a disadvantage (probably, otherwise any business model won’t really work).  Is there a business model that holds water (I think there is but the devil is in the details). Should it be non-profit or for profit or run by a respected body (I would argue that for-profit is possible and should be pursued to make sure the service keeps improving – but then we’re back with a commercial provider).

There are many good questions that need to be thought through but I think the principle of this could work, and if such an approach is to be successful it needs to get off the ground soon and fast.

Note: I am aware that a number of people are working behind the scenes on components of this and on similar ideas. Some of what is written above is derived from private conversations with these people and as soon as I know that their work has gone public I will add references and citations as appropriate at the bottom of this post. 

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Attribution for all! Mechanisms for citation are the key to changing the academic credit culture

A reviewer at the National Institutes of Health evaluates a grant proposal.Image via Wikipedia

Once again a range of conversations in different places have collided in my feed reader. Over on Nature Networks, Martin Fenner posted on Researcher ID which lead to a discussion about attribution and in particular Martin’s comment that there was a need to be able to link to comments and the necessity of timestamps. Then DrugMonkey posted a thoughtful blog about the issue of funding body staff introducing ideas from unsuccessful grant proposals they have handled to projects which they have a responsibility in guiding. Continue reading “Attribution for all! Mechanisms for citation are the key to changing the academic credit culture”

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Somewhat more complete report on BioSysBio workshop

The Queen's Tower, Imperial CollegeImage via Wikipedia

This has taken me longer than expected to write up. Julius Lucks, John Cumbers, and myself lead a workshop on Open Science on Monday 21st at the BioSysBio meeting at Imperial College London.  I had hoped to record screencast, audio, and possibly video as well but in the end the laptop I am working off couldn’t cope with both running the projector and Camtasia at the same time with reasonable response rates (its a long story but in theory I get my ‘proper’ laptop back tomorrow so hopefully better luck next time). We had somewhere between 25 and 35 people throughout most of the workshop and the feedback was all pretty positive. What I found particularly exciting was that, although the usual issues of scooping, attribution, and the general dishonestly of the scientific community were raised, they were only in passing, with a lot more of the discussion focussing on practical issues. Continue reading “Somewhat more complete report on BioSysBio workshop”