Automatic Import, automatic authorship

Question

The current system of having authors ask for authorship and demonstrate their authorship is both unnecessary and annoying. It is unnecessary, as papers hardly ever have authors that cannot defend the work (despite what you read on xkcd), and it is cumbersome, because right now you can't find the attribution of the papers, nor do we have cumulative author scores on authors who aren't here yet.

I think it would be good for the site to assign the author based on the publication authorship list without waiting, and to create the author profiles automatically for all physicists whose work is reviewed, and then do a manual merge of those authors that use several different forms of their name.

We would like to allow anyone to import papers to reviews soon, not just admins, and this would make the task easier--- it would also assign the proper reputation to the proper author.

It also can lead more interest in the site, as we will give Weinberg a score (currently 4), Witten a score, and so on, and authors will want to know how they are faring reputation-wise, just out of curiousity, like "rate my professor" or "hot or not", even if they do not contribute directly. This can lead to a lot of eyeballs and votes. To start the process off, you can import some classic papers by Einstein, Weinberg, and so on, and give them some upvotes.

For a more serious example, I asked for Marco Frasca's paper 0709.2042 to be imported, as a paper sorely demanding a lot of hostile peer review. I think it would be good to associate this paper with his existing account, and he will not be here to do it.

Comments

You're right, this may be useful. The authorship mechanism does not actually help reduce academic politics, just clogs the path for authors. If anyone is able to defend or summarise the paper, so will a fake author. There's also a small window of authors, where the authors are helpless and can't really claim authorship (summary exists, no reviews, haven't presented anywhere). Once this is implemented, the steps to take would be to:

1. Fix the existing submissions manually. There are about 38 submissions in reviews currently, so it will take about an hour or two of work, no automation needed.
2. Update the Submission Creation Requests thread and archive (or delete?) the Paper Authorship Claims thread.
3. There are a number of places where the authorship claim mechanism is explained, most notably in the FAQ and welcome post (how many of you remember this post?), which should get updated.
4. Send a mass-mail informing that it is no longer required to follow the lengthy and annoying procedure to claim authorship.

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Agree with all, except mass-mailing. I don't like to spam people--- just do it (they'll find out quickly enough if they need to).