Anyone who will be near Lithuania this Valentine's Day (February 14, 2012) should try to register for The Value of Unique Scholarly Identifiers to Academics, Institutions and Countries. The conference aims to address a range of issues around the assertion of a scholar's identity. The lack of any global identification system for researchers makes it currently difficult to establish the identity of authors and other contributors to scholarly works.

Thomson's ResearcherID is one system that has achieved some traction. Orcid is another. Speakers will address a range of initiatives, and the response of the worldwide academic community to them. The full program, with speaker abstracts, is here. With luck, papers and presentations from the conference will be made available at the site after the event.