Google’s work at the NCBI/NIH is an example of collaboration fostered by the OpenID Foundation over the two years.  The NIH, OpenID Foundation and participating community members and companies have recently begun some exciting work to disambiguate authors of scholarly works using the OIX Trust Framework, the newly formed Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) organization and the National Library of Medicine.  NIH/NLM is part of a public private effort to use OpenID and other protocols to help validate authorship.  I encourage those interested to become engaged with this transformative work.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have a history of  innovation in the area of federated identity management.  It has accepted Shibboleth logins from the InCommon federation for over two years, and added OpenID support this year.  The OpenIDs it accepts have been certified by the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) to meet the requirements of the Federal Identity, Credential, and Access Management (FICAM) subcommittee of the Federal CIO Council. Google, PayPal, and other OpenID identity providers were among the first to be certified under the FICAM schema.

NIH offers an innovative federated login service called iTrust, that provides a proven and cost-effective federated login solution to departments and agencies across the federal government. Since June,  there have been 18,900 new NIH iTrust user logins, 77% of which are OpenIDs.  This is even though there was no announcement of the new login capability. Via iTrust, NIH is openly encouraging other agencies to adopt the use of OpenID and other portable identity credentials.  The NIH, OpenID Foundation member companies are playing a key role in the future of online identity for this global community of authors, librarians and researchers.

Yesterday at Yahoo!’s campus in California, nearly forty people from the OpenID community came together for a day to discuss the usability and user experience of OpenID and OAuth. Presentations were shared by Facebook about their experience developing Connect, MySpace explained how they’re combining OpenID and OAuth, Yahoo! around how they’re evolving their own OpenID Provider in response to their research, Magnolia shared how they’ve been using OpenID to help reduce spam, Google with their study on federated login user interfaces, and Plaxo wrapping up the day with how they’re looking at OpenID as a piece of a larger “open stack” for the Web. Lots of interesting presentations, analysis, and ways to move forward to help improve the usability of OpenID and OAuth came out of the day.

John McCrea has the play by play if you’re wanting to read more about what happened during the day, but I’m excited to see the sheer number of people and companies from various backgrounds (even those who compete with one another) collectively working to help improve OpenID and build a better Web.