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I started a blog and all I got was a new job
A few weeks ago I arranged to meet Cameron at a pub just across the road from my office. At the time I could stand up at my computer, turn my head and see into the lounge. It was that close. Since then the east side of our floor has been refurbished and I sit in a sunlit bay that overlooks a courtyard, with three empty desks around me and chairs that number between one and four, depending on any number of factors.
Just to make Matt jealous, we do have air-conditioning now. And while I find it very comfortable (although these afternoons I am forced to lower the blind because I start to cook) the comment from most of the women in the lab office has been along the lines of ‘my, but isn’t it cold?’ Except less politely-worded.
All that aside, I was talking with Cameron about something that is very interesting to publishers and information service providers (in case you missed it, I now work for one). Cameron presented these slides at the Eduserv Symposium (and you can watch the recordings of his and the other talks).
Essentially, what we have in the scientific literature—and not just the literature but also when we want to give credit to those who blog, or who deposit data, or who curate databases, or do anything that might be measurable and therefore applicable to assessment—is a huge Zhang problem.
How do we distinguish authors (or to be more precise, contributors) with the same name?
How do we make sure that contributors get credited appropriately for their work, in a day and age where automated metrics are becoming more important. How do you make sure that you get the credit in the next Research Excrement Framework and not the other person with the same name? How, in fact, if you’re this guy do you make sure you’re not the one getting sued for libel; or, using Cameron’s example, if you’re Andrew Wakefield and want to work in immunology, what are you going to do?
I’ve been fascinated by this problem for a while, ever since I started getting stopped in the street and being told that Withnail and I is the best film ever. But as anyone even vaguely familiar with F1000 might not be surprised to learn, I have more than a passing professional interest in it, too.
So it’s gratifying to see the issue coming to the front of the minds of some of the brightest people in the industry. We’re pretty much resigned to having to curate our data manually for a little while, but after hearing rumours and having wishful thoughts, I finally caught up with Geoffrey Bilder at a meeting of the ALPSP yesterday.
The people who brought you the DOI are prototyping a Contributor ID. And I am all of a sudden quite excited about this. You should be too, especially if your name is Zhang.
Can I make an ID for a fake second “Eva Amsen” and blame all the stupid whimsical Yahoo! groups I joined in the mid-nineties on her? (The system isn’t even here yet and I’m looking for ways to break it. No, wait, I mean the other Eva is.)
That wasn’t me!
Yes, of course you can Cath. I mean Åsa. I mean — well, you see what I mean.
Ha! Or one confusing giant ID for Cath, Åsa, and myself, maybe. We will all look so much more productive!
Changing to a less common surname when I got married seemed to fix some problems (and cause a whole heap of new ones).
If I ever publish again it would be something so different to my PhD/postdoc publications that I’d be tempted to use my new name… I may seek advice from the blogosphere on this one if the situation ever arises!
Louise Johnson points out that the problem is compounded by name changes (and another problem, which I’ve been mulling over for a while now, is that of tracking conversations across the webosphere.) Which I forgot about. Thanks Louise.
Oh, sorry Cath, our comments crossed.
Eva, but we’d look pathetic when commenting on each other’s posts
And mine crossed with
mineÅsa’sEva, but we’d look pathetic when commenting on each other’s posts
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No, just you and Åsa. It’s fake Eva who is doing all the blog commenting.
I am already confused.
Hey, your link to Louise Johnson goes to your tweet about this post. Was that a deliberate joke that I’m not getting?
Me and Cath you mean?
I am so confused by these crossing comments and fake identities that I am going to stop commenting for a while
I might do some work, actually
Um no, it was meant to go to her tweet.
I understood that ‘Chang’ was the most popular name on earth, not ‘Zhang’. Maybe it’s a case of mistaken identity, though.
Id no idea.
ÅsaEvaCath’s comment about merged identities is intriguing. Will we need identities for teams (the Australia and New Zealand Multiple Sclerosis Genetics Consortium)? for roles (e.g. The Moderator)> and for corporate entities (Medical Research Council)?
Good question. And seriously, this is the kind of thing I imagine Geoff would like to hear the views of the community on.
I thought Zhang and Xiang and Jiang were the same name in Chinese, just spelled differently with our stupid Latin alphabet. Maybe Chang is the same name, too.
Anyway, this post also reminded me of the time someone messaged me to ask for a photo of Cameron and Cameron was sitting right there and I could turn my laptop to show him. (But Cameron tells the story better, with more frustration about the whole ordeal.)
Did he make the centerfold?
That sound you hear is a paradigm shifting without a clutch.
Ah. Louise’s tweet —now that twitter is back online.
I didn’t know Cameron was found in a handbag!
The crossref contributor id is important even if you have a less common name. Digital identity (and attribution) is a mess, so we can look forward to it being more sorted in the future. Microsoftie Kim Cameron has written a ton of interesting stuff about this on his identity blog, see Introduction to the Laws of Identity
Alright, late to the party as always. @Jenny I’m afraid not the centrefold although it was a Nature -ist magazine. @Stephen, it’s just not any old handbag you know, although I often feel that I’ve been left abandoned on train stations these days, primarily by First Great Western though so no blame can be apportioned to my family.
And I have to say I think Richard picked the best example of a Tweet possible, as Louise herself points out, my first response was “Professor Dame Louise Johnson, FRS DBE, has a twitter account?!?”
Why not, Cameron? Lord Drayson does, after all.
Well it just didn’t seem likely. I know Prof Johnson from her time at Diamond and it just didn’t seem quite like her…or at any rate I was most embarrassed by the idea that she had one and I didn’t know about it. Besides Lord Drayson doesn’t have just one twitter account he has two, one for government stuff and one for racing!
Heh. I had lectures from Johnson and yes, I know exactly what you mean.
I remember her well from my days in the Zool Dept, Oxford. She was very top floor ;-)
Very. And very bright. But a strange habit of closing her eyes when lecturing (or even seminaring).
Because this is vaguely related, and because this place will give it infinitely more traffic than my Twitter feed did
That’s his secret identity, Eva! You’ve given it away!
You can’t even tell if it’s the same person, without proper author ID.
Q, E, and indeed D, huh?
Are you the same lady I asked yesterday about whether this bus went to the station, and if you weren’t, how would I know?
Well, for a start, I (not living in Norfolk) have the standard number of digits.
You mean, either six or nine? In total?
There are 10 types of people in this world. Those who can count in binary and those who can’t.
I’ll take that as a ‘no’, then.
Excuse me, where does this bus go to?
SO, back on topic. An odd thing happened today. Someone left a message on the main phone line here at work. She called to ask me if I had contact info for a certain author, because I wrote about his book. I was confused for a while, but eventually clued in that someone was looking for an author I mentioned as having written my favourite essay in in this book . The author in question has a very common name, and I had searched for more info on him on vain when I wrote that review. Since there are multiple people of that name (don’t want to mention it, or the searcher will find me again here!) it was impossible to find him. It is, however, really easy to find me. The person who called must have found the lablit review, seen my name, searched, found where I currently work (LinkedIn? Nature Network?), found our website, and dialed the phone number there.
The point of this all is, I guess, that us people with unique names are now serving as identifiers (and crappy ones at that) for the Smiths and Zhangs of the world. In this case it was a quick matter of calling her back and saying that I didn’t know the author either, but it made me realize there is an unfair distribution of….stalkability between people with weird names and people with more common names.
There might be a business or network model there. You are a node, Eva. Make good use of the responsibility.