Eat My Attributes (5A)

Eat My Attributes, RDF or Json

Convener: Hal Warren, Director of Publishing Innovation, American Psychological Association and President, OpenID Society

Notes-taker(s): Eva Winer, American Psychological Association

Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

trusted author identity, attribute exchange in scientific collaboration with authorized RDF-XML payloads, author.apa.org, vivo.apa.org, data analytics, semantic network for scientists.

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

Hal Warren, President of the OpenID Society and Director of Publishing Innovation at the American Psychological Association (APA), gave a talk on trusted authorship claims and attribute exchange in scientific communication.

APA, as a scholarly publisher, produces verified claims of authorship that can be consumed by universities, research institutions, social networks, visualization apps and various data analytics tools.

APA authors can manage and extend assertions via identity-proofed accounts on author.apa.org. Identities at author.apa.org follow guidelines set by the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) initiative. The account holder identity is verified with a mail back method: after the account creation, a card with a special code needed to activate the account is mailed to the home address on file.

Once the account is activated, authors are presented with a list of works they can claim. They are not required to claim all of their publications, only those they wish to extend as trust attributes.

Authors always remain in control of the attributes they have extended, and can retract those claims at their discretion. They also have an ability to anonymously assert their expertise in a certain field. A clinical psychologist, for example, can offer advice on Facebook as a specialist on eating disorders. Anonymous ability is especially important in animal research and other sensitive research areas.

The APA’s Publish Trust pilot is centered on authors of articles published in the APA journal, Psychological Services journal. Data for a community of 3,000 authors is now searchable on https://vivo.apa.org. VIVO is an open-source national network for scientific collaboration, sort of a semantic Facebook for scientists that produces RDF data. There are currently 50 VIVO instances at the leading research universities and other agencies in the US, and several international projects.

As attributes of authorship are claimed and extended to the APA VIVO profile, the status of the individual's VIVO page changes from "unverified" to "confirmed”. Exchanges result as authorized RDF-XML payloads which can be included within a VIVO instance.

Cornell University is participating in the pilot as the first consumer of APA author attributes. Trust assertions move within a closed network using InCommon’s SAML-based authentication as the single-sign-on mechanism that allows attribute exchange and linking to APA resources from the account holder's Cornell VIVO profile.

The vision for the APA VIVO is to become an organizational life form. With the addition of profiles for the prominent psychologists of the past, It will be possible to analyze concept development, data trends, and research influences over time. Adding profiles of historical figures could require a few tweaks to the VIVO ontology. “We’ve been wrestling with dead people,” Hal said. Trusted identities and semantic tools such as community network visualizations help researchers discover and contact collaborators, facilitate author disambiguation, and create new value for scientists. Trust becomes highly extensible.