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Call for Participation: CNI Workshop On Scholarly
Identity
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.
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