Publish Trust Framework

About the Project

The Publish Trust Project examines the feasibility of adding trust values to online identities for authors of scholarly publications, thus enabling them to reliably aggregate previous and current works and connect with other experts in their field. Our first experiment uses VIVO as a semantic identity platform with the OIX Trust Framework to produce two-factor assertions of authorship from scholarly publishers of peer-reviewed works and authors.

Current Status

October 2011 - the Publish Trust Framework is entering the OIX Implementation Phase. This initial deployment is centered on authors of articles published in the APA journal, Psychological Services. Data for this community of 1,600 authors is now searchable at https://vivo.apa.org. The site is publicly searchable and does not require a log in, although one is available for participants in the VIVO network.

As attributes are claimed, the status of the individual's VIVO page will change from "unverified" to "confirmed". Authors will claim attributes by creating an account online which is verified through a surface mail back method to confirm account holder identity.

Objectives

Create strong semantic provenance for authorship
Disambiguate authors and their works
Produce Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) for authorship claims
Make Resource Description Framework (RDF) payloads for URI delivery within a secure network
Create strong online peer circles for journal communities
Offer tools and best practices to support publishers of peer-reviewed works as the best source for two-factor assertions of authorship of scientific writing

Method

Create transparent trust conditions for environments and assertions by:

Machine assurance for identity servers
Environment assurance for location security
Network assurance for security
Assurance for Identity server engineers, developers and administrators under identity protection oath
Assertion provider credentials - a transparent description of the assertion including a description of the source, the relationship between the source and the account holder, and a definition of the assertion made transparent at the base URL for the attribute. Example: URI = author.apa.org

The OpenID Society provides a Registry for Identity Servers at www.OpenIDsociety.org/intake and a URI generator for Identity Server administrators, developers and engineers at www.OpenIDsociety.org/membership.html.

Deployment

Use InCommon Federation for secure single-sign-on and InCommon mail attribute for "same as" assertion with author.apa.org account. Example: user@university.edu = user.author.apa.org which resolves at vivo.apa.org for public delivery of trust attributes. Authors manage assertions and participate in closed peer community activities at author.apa.org and use APA intake forms at apa.publishtrust.org to proof accounts.
Deliver user approved trust assertions on the account holder URI in HTML and RDF-XML formats. Add microdata and Json formats as warranted.
Trust assertions move within a closed network where each attribute provider and consumer server is authorized by InCommon protocols and SSL Certificates.
Exchange author attributes between provider and authorized attribute consumer using OpenID Connect protocol. Exchanges result as authorized RDF-XML payloads which can be included within a VIVO instance.

Next Steps

Create trust relationship with Cornell University as a consumer of APA author attributes, using InCommon as the single-sign-on mechanism that allows attribute exchange and linking to APA resources from the account holder's Cornell VIVO profile.
Consult with the Open Researcher Contributor ID (ORCID) developers to deploy a method of providing author attributes from APA to ORCID.
Engage the SER author community through use of semantic data to strengthen the peer circle, facilitate the review of scientific works and provide added value through harvesting the latest publications based on community search.

Conclusion

Success depends on authors' use of strong online trust assertions and on the value of new semantic analytic tools such as community network visualizations that help authors discover and contact collaborators. Better connections for authors results in better science. This is the objective of the Publish Trust Project.

Project advances will be documented on this page. For more information, email info@OpenIDSociety.org.