Duncan Hull, Geoffrey Bilder, Michael Habib, Reynold Guida

ResearcherID, Contributor ID, Scopus Author ID, etc. help to connect your scientific record. How do these tools connect to your online identity, and how can OpenID and other tools be integrated? How can we build an online reputation and when should we worry about our privacy?

Geoff Bilder:

Almost every aspect of a person can change without the person themselves changing. So, you want to have an identifier that is a hook to you, and which is better than a name (which is changeable). What about retinal scans? Fingerprints? OpenID? Where does your profile come in? A profile is a collection of attributes that you use to describe who you are. With author identity, what we want is the ability to get at the profile of a person in an unambiguous manner. Until we have such a thing, how do you tell people what your canonical profile is? To complicate matters even more, each user will want multiple personas, each with their own profiles.

When talking about identity, two issues are often conflated: identity authentication and knowledge discovery identity system. That is, you must be more rigorous in determining swho someone is (logging into your identity) than in figuring out who wrote a paper. Further complications occur in the lossy conversion between languages of authors’ names.

Whatever is done, has to be done on an international scale, must be interdisciplinary, and must be interinstitutional. The oldest content cited thus far in CrossRef (with a DOI) is from the 1600s. What happens when you die to your identifier? A final issue is scale: there are about 200K new DOIs per month, and even if we guess at 5 authors per DOI, then there could be between 5-21K failures of identification per month if you estimate a 96-97% success rate for author identification.

Duncan Hull:

He spoke about openID is science, among other things. Currently, authentication of people is very different in most online applications, and is generally only done with a simple username and password combination. Simon Willison (The Guardian) estimates that the average online user has at least 18 user accounts and 3.49 passwords. OpenID is trying to end up with a situation where there are fewer usernames AND passwords.

OpenID works by redirecting you to your openID provider to log in, then sends you back to the location you started at. However, having a URL as a username is not very intuitive. Further, logging in via redirection can be confusing. Therefore while adoption of openId is growing, it may not properly take off until browsers and other vendors support it better. Mentioned myExperiment as something which accepts openId.

Michael Habib:

Michael presented a nice diagram: a square divided into 4 parts, with “about me” and “not about me” across the top, and “by me” and “not by me” down the side. It is the “not” category for both where the disambiguation of people is the most important. He used the example of Einstein and the LC Authority Files to figure out what all of the different versions of his name are.

Completely different from the LC Authority files, which is manually and carefully checked by only certain people, is ClaimID. ClaimID is a way to collect all aspects of your identity in one place. However, it is dependent upon each individual being truthful about what they have ownership over.

Another approach is the Scopus Author ID, which is completely machine aggregated. It is validated by publications, and scales well. It has 99% precision and 95% recall. The cons is that it is impersonal, and those precision and recall values really aren’t very good when you consider that this is about ownership of an article, and that there are a very large number of people.

There is also 2collab, where you can combine author ids (that you know about) into one identity. Then, you can add any other item on the web that is about you.

Reynold Guida (from Thomson Reuters):

They’ve built software to try to address author identity and attribution. If you look at the literature since 2000, communication and scientific collaboration has really changed. What we notice is that the number of multi-author papers has started to increase, while single-author papers have decreased. A google search for common surnames really highlights the problems associated with identity. Name ambiguity is a real problem. The connection between the reseacher and the institution and the community is a real problem. Two of the most important parts in this discussion are who do I know, and who do I want to know? The connections a person makes affects all aspects of their career.

Therefore they have created researcherId (free, secure, open). Privacy options are controlled by the user, even if the institution created the record. There is integration with EndNote, Web of Knowledge, and other systems to help build publication lists. You can link to / visualize your researcher id profile really easily from your own websites.

Discussion:

Question: Has anyone thought through the security implications of these single ID systems: one slip-up and your entire identity has been hacked? GB: Multiple identities encourages poor behaviour, as the thought of changing your password everywhere is so overwhelming that people don’t do it. But yes, these problems exist. However, the tradeoffs make it worthwhile to their minds. You should NOT conflate knowledge issues with security issues. This is because information for your scholarly profile is, by definition, public anyway.

Question: Do different openId providers and author id and researcher id know about each other in the computational sense? Not really yet.

Question: What about just making the markup of the web more semantically friendly? DH: The Google approach is a good one. RG: It’s all about getting the information into the workflow.

Question (Phil Lord): What worries me is that there has been a big land grab for author identity space: for example, you cannot log into Yahoo with any other open id than a Yahoo open id. There’s a lot of value in being in control of someone’s id. Therefore there is a big potential danger. GB: For every distributed system, you need a centralized indexing thing to get it to work correctly. Therefore we need to make sure that if a centralized system appears, there should be accountability.

FriendFeed Discussion

Please note that this post is merely my notes on the presentation. They are not guaranteed to be correct, and unless explicitly stated are not my opinions. They do not reflect the opinions of my employers. Any errors you can happily assume to be mine and no-one else’s. I’m happy to correct any errors you may spot – just let me know!

Vlak na de lancering van 2collab (eind 2007) keek ik erna en probeerde wat uit. Toen ik echter mijn Furl bestand erin wilde down(up)loaden, omdat ik het gedoe met die wisselende linkmechanismen van Furl beu was, werkte het echter nog niet naar behoren, dus ben ik overgegaan naar Delicious.

Maar inmiddels is het  tijd om eens te kijken hoe het er nu bij staat met 2collab: de verwachtingen waren hoog.

Het begon al niet positief: mijn account bestond nog wel, maar ik had het wachtwoord niet meer, en het email adres waarmee ik destijds het account had opgezet kende 2collab niet meer. Vervelend, dan maar een nieuw account.

De Delicious-output van 1431 items was zo gemaakt (inclusief de notes en de tags), volgens voorschrift naar een html bestand. Van daaruit  kun je het in 2collab inlezen en een standaard tag toeven  bijv ‘Delicious’.
Je kunt er niet voor kiezen om de bookmarks meteen openbaar te maken, dus alles is ‘private’ helaas. Op de vraag ‘Do you want to assign the imported bookmarks to one or more research fields?’  door 2collab zelf heb ik gretig JA geantwoord   dat is nog eens handig.

Na 10 minuten, er zaten er 190 in, ging het scherm op ‘Time-out’: daarmee dacht ik dat het inlezen afgebroken was,  maar dat bleek niet het geval. Met wat heen en weer klikken kwam ik erachter dat het op de achtergrond doorging – zou wel handig zijn als daar ergens iets van te zien was trouwens- dus even geduld.
Na 40 minuten was het hele bestand, alle 1431,  ingelezen.

Aanvankelijk liep de paginatelling op tot 1445 (met 25 hits per pagina was dat sterk overdreven), maar later kwam dat goed.

Na 3 uur zijn van de meeste items wel de notes ingelezen, maar de meeste tags niet. Er zijn eigenlijk op een enkel item na, maar heel erg weinig tags ingelezen, terwijl ik alles getagged en gebundled, heb.
Bij controle van de html file bleken die tags er ook echt in te zitten, de bundels niet, dus dat kan 2collab niet verweten worden.

Nog meer teleurstellingen:

• Er wordt ook allerlei datum-materiaal (bv LAST_VISIT=“1225230918″ ADD_DATE=“1225230918) geëxporteerd uit Delicious dat ook niet meekomt met inlezen, en dat is jammer: van Furl naar Delicious ging dat wel mee.
• Het eerste ingevoerde, dus oudste, item staat nu bovenaan, de meest recente onderaan: dat is niet handig.
• De enige beschikbare ‘tag’ is de tag die toegevoegd is dus: ‘Delicious’
• Er is geen Research field te ontdekken.

Eigenschappen van het systeem die meteen al tegenvallen:

• De notes staan niet op de overzichtspagina, maar je moet er per item om vragen
• Je kunt niet zoeken op de inhoud van de notes, alleen op de titel zelf
• Ik zie geen mogelijkheid om de zoekresultaten te beperken tot je eigen bookmarks
• Alleen de tags die je hebt toegevoegd in 2collab zelf staan op de homepage, niet de ingelezen

Kortom: het is misschien nog wat vroeg, mogelijk komen de tags en de ‘research fields’ er nog bij, maar 2collab valt me niet mee. Als je alleen naar de eigen input kijkt dan: het delen aspect is natuurlijk van een andere orde, daar heb ik nog niet naar gekeken.

Furl is inmiddels overgenomen door Diigo: misschien had ik gewoon daarop moeten wachten .

“Scientists now read 25 per cent more articles from almost twice as many journals than they did six years ago“…

It is an ongoing challenge for them to keep up-to-date on research developments in their field, and identify relevant research to support their own studies without spending too much time gathering irrelevant information.  One solution to this is a combination of accurate information sourcing and sharing, resulting in ‘collective intelligence’..

 The full-article, mentioning the social bookmarking service 2collab, from Elsevier:

http://www.researchinformation.info/features/feature.php?feature_id=179

A social bookmarking fan compared recently 3 of the great free tools: Zotero, Connotea (Nature) and 2Collab (Elsevier). 

2Collab ”is in many ways the best of the three“.
“The emphasis on collaboration makes 2collab more than just a place to store, categorize and manage your scholarly bookmarks. It is also easy to discover new research material, share and identify quality information and mine the collective wisdom of experts. You can also form discussions in private groups or openly with the wider scientific community.
You can add references easily by using a bookmarklet in your browser or importing them from your browser, another social bookmarking or bibliographical site (Scopus).
You can export references in different format. In addition, your library can be shared online with groups of colleagues.

http://www.pandia.com/sew/967-social-bookmarking-for-research-collaboration.html

Slides from the seminar today, for those that asked for them. Thanks to everyone who came, we had a good turn out, much better than expected.

Those Library and Institutional Repository people have asked for an encore too…

Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web

We started writing this paper [1] over a year ago, so it’s great to see it finally published today. Here is the abstract:

“Many scientists now manage the bulk of their bibliographic information electronically, thereby organizing their publications and citation material from digital libraries. However, a library has been described as “thought in cold storage,” and unfortunately many digital libraries can be cold, impersonal, isolated, and inaccessible places. In this Review, we discuss the current chilly state of digital libraries for the computational biologist, including PubMed, IEEE Xplore, the ACM digital library, ISI Web of Knowledge, Scopus, Citeseer, arXiv, DBLP, and Google Scholar. We illustrate the current process of using these libraries with a typical workflow, and highlight problems with managing data and metadata using URIs. We then examine a range of new applications such as Zotero, Mendeley, Mekentosj Papers, MyNCBI, CiteULike, Connotea, and HubMed that exploit the Web to make these digital libraries more personal, sociable, integrated, and accessible places. We conclude with how these applications may begin to help achieve a digital defrost, and discuss some of the issues that will help or hinder this in terms of making libraries on the Web warmer places in the future, becoming resources that are considerably more useful to both humans and machines.”

Thanks to Kevin Emamy, Richard Cameron, Martin Flack, and Ian Mulvany for answering questions on the CiteULike and Connotea mailing lists; and Greg Tyrelle for ongoing discussion about metadata and the semantic Web nodalpoint.org. Also thanks to Timo Hannay and Tim O’Reilly for an invitation to scifoo, where some of the issues described in this publication were discussed. Last but not least, thanks to Douglas Kell and Steve Pettifer for helping me write it and the BBSRC for funding it (grant code BB/E004431/1 REFINE project). We hope it is a useful review, and that you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it.

References

1. Duncan Hull, Steve Pettifer and Douglas B. Kell (2008). Defrosting the digital library: Bibliographic tools for the next generation web. PLoS Computational Biology, 4(10):e1000204+. DOI:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204, pmid:18974831, pmcid:2568856, citeulike:3467077
2. Also mentioned (in no particular order) by NCESS, Wowter, Twine, Stephen Abram, Rod Page, Digital Koans, Twitter, Bora Zivkovic, Digg, reddit, Library Intelligencer, OpenHelix, Delicious, friendfeed, Dr. Shock, GribbleLab, Nature Blogs, Ben Good, Rafael Sidi, Scholarship 2.0, Subio, up2date, SecondBrain, Hubmed, BusinessExchange, CiteGeist, Connotea and Google

[Sunrise Ice Sculptures picture from Mark K.]

เมื่อวาน (14 สิงหาคม 2551) ไปร่วมสัมมนางาน Library Connect Thailand 2008 ซึ่งเป็นงานพบลูกค้าประจำปี ของบริษัท Elsevier จัดขึ้นที่โรงแรมโนโวเทล สยามสแควร์ ซอย 6  … ใครสนใจความเคลื่อนไหวในวงการห้องสมุด จะติดตามอ่านข่าวจาก จดหมายข่าวราย 3 เดือน  ชื่อ Library Connect Newsletter  แทนก็ได้ค่ะ

… มีเกร็ดเล็กๆน้อยๆ เกี่ยวกับ ScienceDirect Update จากงานสัมมนามาเล่าสู่กันฟังค่ะ

1. Features ใหม่ๆ ของฐานข้อมูล Sciencedirect ที่น่าสนใจมากคือ “Document Dowload Manager” เป็นการ download PDFs พร้อมๆ กัน หลายบทความเลยทีเดียว ไม่ต้องเสียเวลารอทีละไฟล์
2. Sciencedirect เพิ่ม “Search within Results” เพื่อให้เราสามารถค้นคำเพิ่ม เพื่อจำกัดผลการค้นลงไปอีก หากค้นแล้วได้จำนวนเยอะเกินไป รวมทั้งเพิ่มคำสั่ง Refine Results เพื่อระบุปีที่พิมพ์ ชนิดเอกสาร หรือเลือกเฉพาะวารสารชื่อที่ต้องการได้ด้วย (ทำนองเดียวกันกับฐานข้อมูล Scopus)
3. Sciencedirect เวลาแสดงผลการค้น หน้าจอจะแสดงเฉพาะรายการบรรณานุกรม  เราสามารถคลิกเลือก “Open All Previews” เพื่อสั่งให้ Preview ผลการค้น ซึ่งสามารถเลือกได้ ว่าจะเรียกดูในลักษณะ  Abstract/Article Outline หรือ Figures/Tables หรือ References ก็ได้ ทำให้สามารถเข้าใจเนื้อหาของบทความได้ง่าย โดยไม่จำเป็นต้อง download PDF มาอ่าน
4. และที่ทันสมัยมาก คือการสร้าง groups และ bookmarks บทความที่เราสนใจ ไว้ใน 2Collab ซึ่งเป็นชุมชนออนไลน์ (Social Network) ภายในฐานข้อมูลนี้

ตัวเองก็เคยมีบทความอยู่ในฐานข้อมูล Scopus บ้างนิดหน่อย เลยลองสมัคร 2Collab มี Profile อยู่ที่  http://www.2collab.com/user:ruchareka/profile

• ลองสร้าง Group ในหัวข้อที่ตนเองสนใจ โดยตั้งชื่อกลุ่มว่า “Informetrics Thailand”
• ใส่ tags หรือคำสำคัญให้บทความของตนเอง (เผื่อใครจะสนใจอ่าน หรือ vote ให้)
• ทำ bookmarks บทความของคนอื่น (ที่อ่านแล้วชอบ)

ลองเล่นดู สนุกดีค่ะ … ทำให้เลิกเล่น Facebook ไปเลย !

Ayer se cumplió un mes desde que Elsevier incorporó en la plataforma de ScienceDirect el marcador social 2collab. Sus origenes se remontan al 2007, cuando se creó el mismo para facilitar la colaboración entre la comunidad de investigadores en las ciencias, la biomedicina y la tecnología en los escenarios de la academia, el gobierno y la empresa privada.

Las tres características principales de 2collab son:

• el manejo y la administración de marcadores para los recursos de interés para los investigadores
• facilitar el compartir información entre grupos ya establecidos de investigadores o propiciar un espacio para que ellos se aglutinen bajo nuevos grupos
• ser el lugar donde se pueden ampliar las interacciones y el contacto entre los investigadores

Si lo desea, lea más acerca de 2collab o puede registrarse para comenzar a utilizar el mismo.

ใครที่เป็นนักวิจัย และมีผลงานตีพิมพ์ในวารสารวิชาการ ที่อยู่ในฐานข้อมูล ScienceDirect และ SCOPUS ของบริษัท Elsevier โปรดทราบ

ขณะนี้ บริษัท Elsevier เปิดบริการใหม่ เป็น Social Networking หรือชุมชนออนไลน์สำหรับนักวิจัยโดยเฉพาะ ที่มีชื่อว่า 2collab (http://www.2collab.com/)

ท่านสามารถสมัครเป็นสมาชิก และจัดเก็บข้อมูลต่างๆ ไม่ว่าจะเป็นรวมรายชื่อบล็อก เว็บไซต์ บทความวิจัย ฯลฯ ที่อยู่ในความสนใจของท่าน … ใส่ tags, bookmarks สร้าง groups เขียน comments แลกเปลี่ยนความคิดเห็นกับนักวิจัยจากทั่วโลก ได้เหมือนกับ social networking อื่นๆ ที่เราคุ้นเคย แต่ที่พิเศษกว่าคือ หากมีผลงานวิจัยอยู่ในฐานข้อมูลของ Elsevier อยู่แล้ว ก็จะทำให้ได้หมายเลข Author ID สามารถใส่ข้อมูลแนะนำตัวเอง รวบรวมผลงานที่ตีพิมพ์และการอ้างอิงทั้งหมดโดยอัตโนมัติ และคนอื่นสามารถเข้ามาเขียน comment ผลงานวิจัยของเราได้ด้วย

เรียกได้ว่า เป็นการผสมผสานเรื่องเคร่งเครียดแบบวิชาการ เข้ากับเรื่องบันเทิงได้เป็นอย่างดี เหมาะอย่างยิ่งสำหรับนักวิจัยรุ่นใหม่ในยุค web 2.0 เป็นที่สุด

… ตัวเองไม่ใช่นักวิจัย แต่ก็มีผลงานตีพิมพ์กับเขาบ้างเหมือนกัน จำนวน 3 papers ทดลองเล่นดูแล้ว สนุกดีค่ะ …

Library 2.0 dev’essere proprio un concetto acquisito se una compagnia mainstream come Elsevier le ha dedicato un numero monografico della newsletter aziendale Library Connect. Per essere giusti la newsletter riporta articoli stimolanti forniti dagli Elsevier boys and girls e soprattutto da bibliotecari di tutto il mondo, nonché esempi di interesse proprio sulle applicazioni pratiche di web 2.0 in ambito editoriale-bibliografico-digitale.

Prendiamo per esempio l’articolo di David Marques, vice president della sezione Architecture e New Technology: perché e come il web 2.0 può influenzare le scelte programmatiche e la visione strategica di una corazzata del mercato. Tra i concetti richiamati, quello di RIA, pilastro del nuovo web, e di web service, con API, SOAP e REST (trovate un tentativo di spiega di questi ultimi terribili acronimi nell’articolo sui mashup pubblicato sull’ultimo fascicolo di AIDA Informazioni).

Marques mostra in sostanza un feeling notevole tra l’azienda e i concetti e gli strumenti del web 2.0, tanto da abbozzare le linee di sviluppo dei software e delle piattaforme dei prodotti Elsevier (in primis banche dati e motori di ricerca) per i prossimi anni. Un servizio che già potete vedere all’opera è per esempio 2collab: spazio di social bookmarking/tagging dedicato al mondo della ricerca e della scienza aperto naturalmente alla collettività degli utenti interessati.

Una frase dell’articolo mi ha colpito: The elements of user contributions and collaboration are cornerstones in Elsevier’s technology strategy for the next three to five years. Certo, bisogna guardarsi dal buonismo o dall’ingenuità. Fare marketing su web e library 2.0 è oggi diventato fin troppo facile, però non dimentichiamo che, nonostante la vastissima diffusione dei tool e delle conoscenze, c’è ancora un congruo numero di soggetti commerciali e istituzionali che, invece di lasciarsi andare a sperimentazioni ardite, si rinchiudono in sterili, ideologiche discussioni sulla natura degli angeli (non mi fate scrivere termini che poi mi attirano quintalate di spam ).

E comunque, nell’apprezzamento complessivo per questa iniziativa, spero che, oltre al pregevole sostegno al W2.0, Elsevier voglia porsi anche, coerentemente con una delle affermazioni contenute nell’articolo (The core of all Web 2.0 services consists of open, published, structured interfaces of data, on the back of which value is created), come un provider di open content, oltre che di open tool .

E infine… due lire di presunzione: le pagine centrali del fascicolo sono dedicate, sotto il titolo How is your library using 2.0 to reach new users?, all’esplorazione geografica delle modalità di impiego dei tool del web 2.0: non perdetele!