your unique author-ity

There are many ways to generate lists of one's publications, Martin Fenner lists a few in

An easy online list of all your publications

Mention is made of both the Scopus author ID, and the Thomson ResearcherID.  This makes me wonder what ever happened to the Digital Author Identifier system in the Netherlands.

A Google search turns up

Digital Author Identification (DAI) is a unique national number assigned to every author who has been appointed to a position at a Dutch university or research institute or has some other relevant connection with one of these organisations. SURF and OCLC PICA have set up a link with the PICA thesaurus of personal names that is maintained and updated by the university libraries. One very important factor in this system is the link between the Metis research information system and the repository.

surffoundation.nl - Digital Author Identifier (DAI)

Searching also turns up a paper and running system for UAI_Sys

UAI_Sys is a pilot Java web application allowing each one author to register/update his/her own metadata content and request a unique identifier that s/he is going to retain and make use of for life. Apart from obtaining his/her unique author identifier (codenamed: UAI code), the author specifies the subset of his/her personal (meta)data that s/he wishes to become globally available to all interested parties, including variations of his/her name used in publications s/he has (co-)authored. The system supports the industrial standard interface for other applications to connect to and co-function with, over the Internet.

See UAI_Sys application and paper at DLIST.

Of course, this gets me thinking about Name Authorities and whether there's some way to get a worldwide name authority unique ID.  I discover that Lorcan of course has already written about this: Names, Names, Names - VIAF (the Virtual International Authority File)

UPDATE 2008-02-25: I also found a report from a Knowledge Exchange Institutional Repositories workshop - Author identification report (PDF, September 2007).