A proposal for uniquely identifying and managing authors in the scientific publishing world.

1. Unique author ID project Christopher Leonard

2. Authorid.com One central registry for all authors in all of science Run by a consortium of publishers and database providers a la CrossRef Run along same lines as other sites such as LinkedIn. com Basic author id, name(s) and publications are only required fields Author can optionally add much more info to their own homepage (such as older publications, conference proceedings, email, homepage links, bio, cv) Optionally make use of web2.0 technologies to create a community of researchers - but let’s keep it simple for now.

3. Author ID cannot contain name fragments (as this is part of the problem). Alphanumeric characters are fine: 6HX42E Identifiers are public Database can be queried from any interested information providers As importance grows, researchers are more interested in making sure their details are correct - so can correct anomalies, omissions. Authors can edit their details All authors are offered randomly generated IDs if they don’t already have an author ID. Alternatively they can be offered ones when submitting to arxiv/journals [not just those with potentially confusing names]

5. How might it look in print?

6. Online: IDs link to homepages on authorid.com

7. So how would it work? Author submits to arXiv/journals and supplies ID at the same time arXiv/publishers can update database with this new publication If no ID, arXiv/publishers can request a new one for that person which is assigned to this paper. Onus is then on author to update authorid.com homepage to keep it up to date. There will be cases which will need to be de-duped (1 author, multiple IDs) and these records would need to be merged by a person who can verify this - phone/email/etc.

8. Smart search URL structures www.authorid.com/id/63FT2R > my unique authorid page www.authorid.com/name/leonard > all records with ‘leonard’ in name field www.authorid.com/inst/kavli > all records with ‘kavli’ in institue field [note: this is a free text field - not tackling institute IDs yet]

9. Can issue author IDs from this point on, but could also issue them retrospectively - like DOIs for older scanned material All information is public domain - why not? Will require some manual de-duping and investigative work though.

10. Author ID db General public can read info in the db through website Authors can update records when validated Web interface arXiv & publishers can create & update records Any interested party can query database: SPIRES HEPDATA ADS CDS … Any developer Authoritative, publisher-independent, open, free, scalable