Scientific Identity

I have been thinking a lot about distributed identity lately and what it means for scientists. This was fueled by a bunch of things, including the recent news about OAuth, and discussions around social networks in science.

We keep talking about how to connect information together. In the general web world, you have various services that, with varying degrees of success, bring things together into a common namespace. What we need to do in the scientific space is something similar. We have standards in place to make sites and services talk to each other. If we could figure out how to move our scientific identity, i.e. our collaborators, our communications (formal and informal, peer reviewed or otherwise), and our interests across services, while maintaining control over the communications, we would be in a very good place as we redefine how we communicate and practice of science.

Personally, I’d like to see journals and scientific “networks” adopt OpenID, OAuth, and other web standards and along with DOIs and perhaps something like SciFOAF. Another paradigm to look at is laconica, which allows you to communicate across communities (and makes good use of OAuth), in essence giving you a distributed identity. In true internet meta-fashion, you can sign up using OpenID.

On a parting note, a key success factor will be abstraction. We need to have the tools, etc in place that all the underlying complexity is abstracted away, otherwise there will always be too much friction to get started

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