Scientist Identification Number
Scientific information is increasingly stored electronically and
published on the World Wide Web (WWW). A raising problem is, however,
internet reference degradation (1-3). Dellavalle et al. propose that
original information may be requested directly from authors (1). This
implies that the current address of the corresponding author is known and
still active.
Scientists are constantly on the move, often working only for only a
few years in a particular laboratory. Therefore, mailing addresses and e-
mail addresses of corresponding authors in publications can become
outdated very quickly. After only a few years, it can become tricky to
track someone down. Not only can electronically published content
disappear (1-3), the links to its authors has a very short half-life. For
scientific discussions and exchange of material, a system to find a
scientist’s address easily, rapidly, and reliably, even several years
after publication, would be extraordinarily helpful and ultimately help
the advancement of scientific knowledge.
The Swiss MD-PhD Association (SMPA) (4) aims at promoting scientific
discussion and interdisciplinary exchange of information. We believe that
creating a central science author database would substantially ease
scientific communication. The principle is simple: Scientists could
voluntarily register their mailing address, e-mail address, and changes
thereof. Registered scientists get a unique SIN (Scientist Identification
Number) assigned, i.e., a number or alphanumeric string that remains
constant [analogous to a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) (5)]. For
correspondence, journals would indicate an author's constant SIN instead
of an ever-changing e-mail address. The database would simply link the SIN
to the current contact information, thus allowing easy retrieval of the
present contact directions.
Such a service should be freely offered online by an independent
organization, and, ideally, SINs would be linked to PubMed and similar
scientific databases.
As more and more organizations and governments are using the open
infrastructure called Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) for
managing personal data, we propose to base such a SIN database on LDAP
(6).
Last but not least, another important advantage of linking scientist
identifiers to PubMed would be unequivocal search results for authors with
common names or names containing special characters.
We hope that this idea will contribute to the discussion on open
distribution of knowledge and its preservation within the scientific
community.
Lukas T. Jeker*
Pediatric Immunology, Center for Biomedicine, Department of Clinical-
Biological Sciences, University of Basel, Mattenstrasse 28, 4058 Basel,
Switzerland.
David T. Winkler*
Department of Neurology, Basel University Hospital, Petersgraben 4, 4051
Basel, Switzerland.
Luc A. Otten*
Tumor Immunology, University of Lausanne, 155, ch. des Boveresses, 1006
Epalinges, Switzerland.
David M. Andel*
Artificial Intelligence Lab, University of Zurich, Andreasstrasse 15, 8050
Zürich, Switzerland.
*Board of the SMPA
References:
1. R. P. Dellavalle et al., Science 302, 787 (2003).
2. D. Kelly et al., PLoS Biol. April 2 (no. 4) (2004) (available at
http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-
document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0020099).
3. J. Whitfield, Nature 428, 592 (2004).
4. See http://www.smpa.org.
5. S. DeRisi, R. Kennison, N. Twyman N, PLoS Biol. Nov 1 (no. 2)
(2003) (available at http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-
document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0000057).
6. See http://www.openldap.org/.
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