APSR Identifying Researchers Workshop
This is one of the workshops that has been on my to do list to review online but that has taken me a while to get to it. That’s a shame because there is a lot of useful material in here on identity in general and specifically on reputation management on the web. Before I get started on describing the workshop, my thanks go to Patty McMillan, who presented at the workshop and mailed me through the link for the presentations and papers.
The workshop was, in its own words, about the issue of managing researcher and author identities:
[This issue] is a significant one that has an impact on a range of situations including, but not limited to, scholarly communications. This is an issue not only for researchers who nowadays interact with multiple identity and security systems but also for scholarly communications where the need to accurately identify authors and describe their scholarly resources is increasing in importance. The purpose of the workshop therefore is to bring together people from these diverse fields, with a view to seeking common ground and coordinating developments in author identity management in Australia. Some of the day will be spent analysing and sharing the experience of people delivering services in the current scholarly communications environment. A discussion of some of the burgeoning solutions for author identity management will also take place.
What was particularly interesting was the diversity of opinions and ways of approaching this. There are very clear ties to identity management on a number of levels:
- Access to systems - how does the researcher securely identify themselves to be able to collaborate with external groups and access systems in the university;
- Reputation management - how does the researcher ensure that they are accurately represented and attributed in a range of systems they may not necessarily control;
- Applied identity - how does identity affect other areas such as scholarly comms;
All of these tie in with what JISC is already working on so it’s of significant interest. The AMTP Programme to get institutions to join the UK federation is already affecting how users including researchers get access to journals and will soon, with SARoNGS and projects such as GFIVO affect how they interact with other researchers. They already have some element of managing their identity within systems within projects such as myExperiment and this is likely to increase as virtual research environments (VREs) and eScience simply become part of the toolset researchers use.
Lawrie Phipps and I did a session at the NGE Event this year on reputation management that was raising similar issues about how reliable reporting of a researcher’s output online was becoming increasingly important to how they were perceived. With the rise of Open Access publishing and new research evaluation frameworks being developed worldwide then I would think that’s only going to be come more important.
Finally, our future work on identity and access management is going to look at consolidating what we have but ensuring that we then apply this within specific areas such as e-learning, e-research, repositories, etc. It’s only by doing this that we are going to find out whether the pilots and studies we have carried out so far work on a much larger scale.
So, the presentations and papers are definitely worth a look and can be found here.
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[…] July, 2008 I note from James Farnhill’s blog that the talks and slides from this one-day workshop are available from the Australian Partnership […]