Image via Wikipedia Which is not to say that I am any good at software engineering, good practice, or writing decent code. And you shouldn’t take Greg to task for some of the dodgy demos I’ve done over the past few months either.

This post is a follow on from a random tweet that I sent a few weeks back in response to a query on twitter from Lord Drayson, the UK’s Minister of State for Science and Innovation.

Following on from Science Online 09 and particularly discussions on Impact Factors and researcher incentives (also on Friendfeed and some video available at Mogulus via video on demand) as well as the article in PloS Computational Biology by Phil Bourne and Lynn Fink the issue of unique researcher identifiers has really emerged as absolutely central to making traditional publication work better,

All good traditions require someone to make an arbitrary decision to do something again. Last year I threw up a few New Year’s resolutions in the hours before NYE in the UK. Last night I was out on the shore of Sydney Harbour. I had the laptop – I thought about writing something – and then I thought – nah I can just lie here and look at the pretty lights.

This is the second in a series of posts (first one here) in which I am trying to process and collect ideas that came out of Scifoo. This post arises out of a discussion I had with Michael Eisen (UC Berkely) and Sean Eddy (HHMI Janelia Farm) at lunch on the Saturday. We had drifted from a discussion of the problem of attribution stacking and citing datasets (and datasets made up of datasets) into the problem of academic credit.

Following on from my post there has been lots of discussion both in the comments to the post and also support and ideas on other blogs. I also had a good talk (I know, face to face, how archaic :) with Jeremy Frey about the idea. Here I want to collate a few of the comments and ideas. Jean-Claude makes a very good point in a comment on the original post. I believe it will be possible, with resources,Â

A whole series of things have converged in the last couple of days for me. First was Jean-Claude’s description of the work [1, 2] he and Brent Friesen of the Dominican University are doing putting the combi-Ugi project into an undergraduate laboratory setting. The students will make new compounds which will then be sent for testing as antimalarial agents by Phil Rosenthal at UCSF.