An international author identification system could allow scientists to receive credit for all their scientific contributions and would solve the problem of identity in a world of limited surnames. This is the premise of an article in the December issue of EMBO Reports (9, 1171-1174; 2008) by Howard Wolinsky. Not a new premise, by any means, but are we any closer to achieving this end? And what are the pros and cons?

Timo Hannay, publishing director of nature.com is quoted in the article: “I’d love a user of Nature.com to be able to click on an author’s name and to be able to see a list of everything that we publish by them. And that kind of thing, which seems really trivial, should be very straightforward, but actually isn’t because we don’t have identifiers associated with them … We’ve got a world in which scientists have assigned numbers to all kinds of things: to genes, to species, to stars, to molecules, to the articles they write. The one thing they left out was themselves…..A global author ID does bring you the same benefits that you already have from [a] unique article ID, and you can locate an article very quickly and easily online if you know what its DOI [digital object identifier] is.”

The article goes on to describe some of the challenges and complexities of this apparently simple goal (which is, in fact, anything but simple). One issue is whether people would want to assign themselves such a number in principle, given concerns about privacy and possible misuses. Another is the extent of cooperation that would be required by many publishers, databases, institutions and other organizations, as well as the interoperability of their technical systems.

Wolinsky concludes: “In the end, whether an author ID system is a universal database or a connected and compatible network of databases, it has to serve the needs of the scientific community. There is a careful balance to be struck between giving credit where credit is due and knowing everything about everyone. Where that balance lies will be up to the community and those who collaborate to make such a system a reality.”