I just got to Washington, DC for tomorrow’s Society for Scholarly Publishing’s Workshop (#SSP2012).  Euan Adie (Digital Science), Ellen Rotenberg (Thomson Reuters), Laurel Haak (ORCID) and I will be discussing Applying Unique Identifiers to Understand and Establish Influence. SSP’s theme this year is “Social, Mobile, Agile, Global: Are You Ready?” A very broad topic that I hope engages the crowd – this undoubtedly has the possibility to be a learning experience for all. Our workshop is designed for publishers and others involved in scholarly research to understand the benefits of contributor IDs (or “Author IDs”), including a bit of the history and maybe even a few war stories.

The timing is perfect since we’ve been talking about altmetrics lately and the idea of “grey metrics” (“Alternative is The New Grey”). The workshop provides a foundational understanding of why identifiers really matter (hint: without knowing who is who metrics are meaningless). One of the key problems we’ll discuss tomorrow is the fallacy that some data is better than no data. The data itself isn’t bad but if only a few authors are identified accurately, then the noise overwhelms the substance. You can’t trust the system or its metrics … and that is a bad thing!

Let’s talk more! As always if you’re going to be at the event and want to connect, send me a DM on twitter to meet up.