I was fortunate to be able to participate in an excellent symposium that Harvard University hosted on May 16, 2012 exploring issues in contribution and attribution in scholarly communications. This connects in complex ways with work that is underway in developing new metrics for scholarly impact, author IDs and authority control, and the convergence of identity management, biography and bibliography. For me, one of the most interesting aspects of the discussions at the meeting and the subsequent report was the recognition that scholarly publishers need to explicitly structure metadata that characterizes scholarly contributions of contributors to publications, and that we face a major challenge in the development of norms and standards to facilitate this. The report from this meeting is now available, along with other background materials, at
http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/attribution_workshop
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
