This document summarizes the results of a survey about author identifiers for scientists. The majority of respondents felt that author identifiers should have the primary purposes of enabling unique identification of authors and author profiles. Most felt the identifiers should be managed by a central organization like CrossRef or the National Library of Medicine, and that there should be a single unified author identifier system rather than multiple competing systems.

1. A few questions about an author
identifier for scientists
Survey by Martin Fenner, conducted April 14-24, 2009
http://tinyurl.com/cpexqo

2. 1. What is the purpose of an
author identifier for scientists?
Author profile
Authentication
Unique identifier
Other
0 10 20 30 40 50
Other: enable rich metrics, disambiguating the literature, an identifier (not reqd to be unique)

3. 2. What is the best name for an
author identifier for scientists?
Researcher ID
Author ID
Digital Author Identifier
Contributor ID
Other
0 6 12 18 24 30
Other: does not matter, Unique Author ID (UAID), Scientist License Plate (SLIP), any other,
really, ScID

4. 3. The author identifier system
should be used for:
Authors
Database submitters
Reviewers
Editors
Commenters
Bloggers
Other
0 10 20 30 40 50
Other: should be generic and general to all contributions, etc.

5. 4. Who should pay for the author
identifier system?
Journal Publisher
Database maintainer
Author
Blogger
Other
0 4 8 12 16 20
Other: public money, grants agencies, etc., cost? c'mon. trivial.

6. 5. Should author identifiers be
managed by a central
organization?
No
13
Yes
33

7. 6. Which organization should
manage author identifiers?
NLM
Other 5
10
CrossRef
18
Other: A non-profit consortium, etc., OpenID/distributed model

8. 7. Should an author identifier
system for scientists be based on
OpenID?
Yes
Other 13
5
What's an OpenID?
11
No
15
Other: yes/no: OpenID = authentication; author ID = identification, it could be if done right,
Don't care

9. 8. Should there be one or several
author identifier systems?
One
28
Several
6
Several with one top system
10