There is also related work by the Library of Congress, OCLC, British Library, BnF and DNB to create a Virtual International Authority File (http://VAIF.org)

The strength of the ISNI project, in particular is the engagement of large-scale media companies, who have a strong business case need for such an identifier: the payment of royalties. While science and STM publication could certainly take advantage of such a system, it is far more likely to be widely adopted and used when driven by large companies with a vested interest in adopting it.

I think that an author ID will solve many problems, and I think we can solve the issues you mention. My biggest concern is privacy. Even if you don’t have to publish anonymously, an author ID will make it much easier to connect different pieces of information together. Geoffrey has some scary examples in a comment to his CrossRef blog post that you link to

True, but on the other hand is doesn’t hurt to play the game when it helps establish the value of what you publish. From the 2008 Annual Report of the Massachusetts Medical Society:

“NEJM’s 2007 impact factor stood at 52.589, up 2.5 percent from last year’s 51.296. Impact factors are citation and article-based calculations that reflect the influence of a particular journal’s articles on subsequent academic work. The higher the impact factor, the more credibility a journal has in the research community and the more likely papers published in it will be noticed. Consequently, authors often use impact factors to determine where to submit important papers for publication.”

Disambiguating author names is important in ensuring the accuracy of any kind of value measuring system, impact factor being only one of those, as you note.

1) Much as I would like to be able to say I was “interviewed in Nature,” I was, in fact, interviewed by Martin Fenner on his blog on Nature Network. This is not to deprecate Martin’s blog (which is clearly excellent), but there is an important difference between the two. BTW, I think that the mere fact that you made this confusion could be the subject of a whole new interesting thread .

2) As to your point about the potential of author IDs to to exacerbate “the numbers game,” there is certainly that possibility, but I think there is also the potential to actually extend the ways in which we are able to measure how researchers “contribute” to their respective disciplines. Do they review lots of papers? Do they produce valuable data sets? Do they organize lots of conferences? Do they create videos illustrating complex methodologies? Do they blog? This is why CrossRef eschews the term “Author ID” in favor of “Contributor ID”. We view the creation of such a system as potentially allowing us to get a more rounded picture of how researchers participate in scholarly discourse.

My concern is about the derivative activities that could be driven by a database approach to the very real and important issues Phil raises. The more systematic we make scientific publishing, it seems, the more of it there is, the thinner the slices are, and the more overwhelmed its practitioners become. Despite MORE information, we seem to find truth just as elusive as ever. Will an author ID generate more heat? Or shine more light?