>1. What would an unique author identification (or DOI) look like and could it represent other information (e.g. first publication date, institution, etc.)?

Why do you need this other information to be represented in the identifier? Seems like once you have the unique identifier, linking to all this other information (across various DBs, etc) will be relatively painless.

>2. How would you make a system secure and verify author information?

I think this is a solved problem? Fairly certain existing identifiers (e.g. OpenID) have good authentication.

>3. How would the information be kept relevant?

What information? The various DBs that list information about the author? I think you have no choice but to leave it up to each individual DB to keep their data relevant, it's not as if PLoS would want to make sure the information about me on MIT's server's is up-to-date (nor could they if they wanted to).

>4. Could the system be incorporated into other authentication protocols such as Open ID?

This is pretty important. I think it is critical that this be something which is an open (preferably widely adopted) standard. Especially something which will be adopted outside of specialty science / science publishing sites. This will give much more flexibility down the line to people trying to build new science-related websites.

To provide a concrete example, Mediawiki already supports OpenID so any science wiki could incorporate that tomorrow. The more specialized the standard, the more of a barrier there is to adoption, since software packages won't support it out of the box.

What would be the barriers to adopting, for instance, OpenID? What would be the next steps? What organization would make the most sense to lead the effort - NCBI? The nascent web-science community is in serious need of a unique identifier to allow aggregation of user comments / reviews / publications across disparate online communities. Without a unique, authenticated identifier, it will be really challenging to establish an online reputation that might eventually hold similar standing to the reputation derived from a scientist's paper publication record.

we really need to get started on this now, glad to see PLoS One taking some initiative in spreading the word.

Thanks,
Jason Kelly
http://openwetware.org