Requirements for Author Registries

The construct of names as it is used today is based on the administration of Napoleon I, established to ease the recruiting of soldiers. Nowadays, networking of Web 2.0 services, of Open Access research output, and traditional publication channels requires unique and persistent author identifiers more appropriate to the networked world. Personal names, which are the current means of identification, are far away from being unique and persistent, even combined with date and place of birth.

In principle, each person should have the possibility to generate more than one author identifier. This feature disables the ‘big brother’ scenario effectively on the one hand and is not a serious problem for the registry in its intended implementation due to the fact that in the context of science networking multiple identifiers may result in open linking.

A closer view into the construct of personal names shows many further structural problems: names contain more information than requested for identifying persons like their gender, their ethnic background and the approximate age of the person. Based on these facts, we can develop a number of requirements for author registries and person identifiers. It is obvious that not only (science) authors registries need to be developed, but in parallel more general person registries of unique and persistent identifiers are already being developed, such as social security numbers (in the US) or tax numbers (in Germany, initiated in 2008) or cooperations of systems like the Norwegian Scientific personnel and document service Frida. Author identifiers (or person identifiers in a broader sense) need to be offered in a globally standardized, unique, free and persistent way. Today we have many disparate projects already, what is missing is their standardisation. (See the article "Author identification" by Eberhard R. Hilf, Bernd Kappenberg and Hans E. Roosendaal also in this issue of the Euroscientist)

An author registry should not be operated by a governmental institution, but as a multi-national service. CERN is an example of such an organisational body and also a candidate host. Linking with official identifiers like tax-payer’s numbers or social security numbers would ease getting funding, but in an era of expanding official control could result in a ‘big brother’ service.

To start up a registry service, some added value should be offered, value more obvious to the broad (non scientific) audience than just an author identifier. Such value could be a persistent email-forwarding or a just text-based ‘light’ version of a web site, which could contain, for example, a linked collection of those pages containing the respective identifier.

Every registry entry should be persistent until at least 90 years after the death of the corresponding person. The timespan of 90 years is in accordance with the duration of protection of intellectual property rights announced in the latest CULT proposal of the European Parliament.

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Thomas Severiens teaches advanced mathematics and information engineering at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. He is member of the advisory board of the Deutsche Initiative NetzwerkInformation (DINI)¹ and of the Dublin-Core Metadata Initiative². Since 1995 he has managed the PhysNet³ service for the European Physical Society (EPS).

Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
University of Osnabrück
49069 Osnabrück
Germany
severiens@mathematik.uni-osnabrueck.de

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¹ DINI: http://www.dini.de/
² Dublin-Core Metadata Initiative: http://www.dublincore.org/
³ PhysNet: http://www.physnet.net/