I had an interesting conversation this week with the folks behind https://biofactoid.org, a service to allow researchers to openly make available the semantics behind pathways they study in their paper. Their service is working quite well at the moment because they hide all of the complexity from researchers. They told me that even using terminology like "database" or "identifier" reduces the likelihood of researchers completing the task. I say this because I think the idea that researchers will use a self generate public key won't work at the the scale of our scholarly ecosystem (roughly 5M papers peer reviewed papers published annually).

You need to provide tools that abstract this away for users, like any good software, but passkeys are exactly that technology at work and currently gaining widespread adoption.

If my mom gets a better user experience from passkeys than from passwords, then researchers will get a better user experience from passkeys than they will get from having authorizations and workflow for dozens of different publishers, including talking to librarians on the phone.

I had a different experience while working at a startup from 2010 — 2012. It helped us to get to a uniform way of thinking about bugs, and gave us a ratchet for continuous improvement with the product. It wasn’t a silver bullet, but it helped.

Of related interest, I"m just back from a workshop on Open Science from a group that advises the commissioner. I was an invited expert in to the workshop. This is part of the route through which announcements like the one linked here get made. I've written up my noted https://medium.com/p/7691802b543a

Slightly related, I just took part in a workshop of experts who are tasked with advising the commissioner on policy decisions for making open science happen in the EU, I've written up my notes: https://medium.com/p/7691802b543a