ResearcherID doesn’t seem like all that

By Deepak Singh | Published: January 17, 2008

Neil reports (via Pierre) on Thomson Scientific’s new program, ResearcherID. ResearcherID is a “global, multi-disciplinary scholarly research community”.

Apparently, ResearcherID will give you a unique ID number and you can use that number to search for your publications etc. Currently the service is invitation only, so I can’t tell you how it looks and works quite yet.

Sound good so far? Now for the bad part. This is Thomson, so I am likely not to give them the benefit of the doubt. As Neil notes, there is no indication of how it will be developed or whether standards will be involved. What we really need is not Thomson’s way of giving researchers an ID, but a general approach built on top of the OpenID and OAuth specifications, or even better still, an active participation with the OpenID community to develop a system where your scientific credentials can be connected to a unique OpenID.

I ask again. Why is the scientific community, especially publishers, not an active part of developing open web identity and portability standards? We shouldn’t be building our own special web, but rather becoming a better part of the one that already exists.

Maybe some of us should get some “names” involved and start a non-profit. I am getting rather frustrated and impatient.

Technorati Tags: Standards, Data Portability, Identity, Open Science, ResearcherID

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Ian Mulvany

Hi Deepak,

We have implimented OpenID on Connotea. We think it is a good technology to converge on for managing identity, though the uptake is probably going to be from the usual first adopters. Universities had a big hand in getting email adopted. If they lock on to OpenID in the same way, and each new student receives an OpenID then I think that could really pave the way for widespread adoption in the sciences.

- Ian

Brian Gilman

Hey Deepak,

This is exactly why I started SciLink http://www.scilink.com. 20k users and counting. Take a look and give us some feedback. We'd love to hear from you and your readers!

mr. gunn

Neil's right. The majority in academia are really clueless. I think OpenID works fairly well for asserting identity already, and it tells you where to go for more info on the person. Why would someone, given that they knew about OpenID, want some random number that depended on Megacorp's resolver and wasn't easily traceable back to the person when the resolver stops working?

Neil

Deepak, you'd be less incredulous if you still worked in academia :) And the key phrase is "seemingly open", I think. Your average, work-a-day research academic is just completely unaware of these exciting developments that we assume to be common knowledge and discuss every day.

OWW as a base for researcher IDs is an excellent idea. Count me in, I'd be happy to contribute in any way that I can.

Deepak Singh

Jason

Bang on. I think OWW is in a good place to champion this cause, and I'd be happy to help. One reason that I am (very slowly) starting to program again is that I feel the need to contribute to these efforts on data portability and identity. We should talk about it sometime.

I find it somewhat incredulous that a seemingly open community (scientists) has not embraced the best platform we have (the web). Anway, more on this topic later

Jason Kelly

Great post, I couldn't agree more. We really need an Open identifier in order to tie together contributions across multiple sites in the "scientific web". Additionally, it will help bridge the gap between your web-contributions and your traditional peer-reviewed publications. It seems like a more formal ID system is the first step towards integrating web contributions into the scientific reward systems in a real way. We've batted this idea for awhile w/r/t OpenWetWare. If there was a critical mass of folks who wanted to get behind a scientific ID system built on an open, portable standard OWW could provide technical resources as well as be a non-publisher, 3rd party if that helps for the politics of the thing. We already use OpenID on the site, so it might not be a huge stretch.

Cameron Neylon

I actually find the whole concept of passing over the control of my identity, whether personal or scientific, to a commercial entity a bit creepy (though why I'd be happier to give it to a 'service provider' is a fair question). But as you say, we need proper standards built on OpenID or similar and proper data portability built on transparent standards.

ResearcherID doesn’t seem like all that

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