What It Means for Universities to Run Their Own PDS: The Potential of DID as Academic Infrastructure - Nightflight

Articulates what I was saying in Berlin, but makes a better case from the researchers' perspective:

"Researchers' identities are fragmented. Grant IDs, ORCID, institutional email addresses, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and various social media platforms... The core of "who I am" depends too heavily on institutions and platforms."

Instead of thinking "I belong to an institution" - the researcher as the contents of an Institutional container - with Digital IDs we can invert this to "the researcher is the container, affiliation history is the contents." Career moves from one institution to another become "additions to one's history", which DID make as "visible as the path one person has walked. Publication history, co-authorship networks, citation relationships attach to the person, not the institution".

University PDSs mean there's "No need to depend on external platforms for "official verification"... handles become business cards. Followers and post history travel with you ... Papers, preprints, and casual discussions integrate under one identity... If grant IDs and ORCID are persistent identifiers for publications, DID could become a persistent identifier for all academic communication."