Call For Participation
The Management of Scholarly Identity
A CNI Workshop
April 4, 2012 (following the CNI Spring Member Meeting)
Sheraton Inner Harbor Hotel
Baltimore, Maryland
10AM – 3PM
The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is hosting an invitational workshop for organizations actively involved in developing systems, services, databases, standards or policy frameworks addressing author identity management within the academy and the scholarly communication systems. The purpose of this workshop is to understand and coordinate developments in historically independent spheres that involve the management of authorial identity, publication histories, and other parts of academic biography (for example, grants awarded to faculty); in the new digital scholarly communications environment there is at least potential convergence among many of these activities. A particular focus of the workshop will be to identify work that can help information to move more effectively across the many different silos in this area. Here are some of the relevant threads:
A number of proposals for author identifiers have now largely coalesced into the ORCID initiative, which remains very much a work in progress; there are also international standards efforts (which seem to have rather different objectives) under development. This work is not yet well connected to the increasingly widely deployed campus identity management efforts employing Shibboleth and organized under InCommon.
It has become clear that authors need to take control of their personal bibliographic record, and that this record is increasingly important as input to tenure and promotion (through the use of both long-standing and new measures of scholarly impact); this record lives in a number of systems, including Web of Science, Google Scholar, and Microsoft Research Academic, to name only a few. The mechanisms to make authenticated corrections to this record are very poor, and such changes do not automatically propagate from one system to another. A variety of other systems – research library institutional repositories, research management information systems, faculty social networking systems, and others – also need feeds of personal bibliographic records as they evolve.
National and international library name authority has been almost entirely focused on authors of books; it is clearly going to have to expand its scope to other forms of creative expression. With the development of institutional repositories research libraries are re-inventing name authority control for their local authors; this trend is further accelerated by various funder or institutional open-access mandates. All of this work needs to be connected to the developing author ID systems.
Universities and other organizations are starting wide scale deployment of a new generation of research management systems and faculty profile management systems (often migrating from ad-hoc, locally developed systems to the adoption of common platforms like Kuali Coeus and Vivo) that involve management of faculty biographies and bibliographies, and need to be able to cross institutional boundaries for a number of purposes. As a byproduct, we also have emerging opportunities to create new kinds of dictionaries of national biography for research communities.
CNI has been tracking developments in this area for some time, and held an earlier workshop on closely related issues in 2007. However, a great deal has changed over the past five years, and it is time for a fresh examination of the issues.
In order to have a productive discussion, the size of the workshop is limited. Prospective participants should contact CNI Associate Director Joan Lippincott (Joan@cni.org) as soon as possible with a few paragraphs on their interests and relevant work that they are doing in this area; unless otherwise requested, these will be shared with other participants and become part of the public conference report that CNI will prepare. Selected attendees will be asked to give brief presentations based on these submissions.
CNI will provide conference facilities, refreshments, and lunch; travel and lodging expenses are the responsibility of the participants. As we accept participants, we’ll provide more detailed logistical information.