Unique author identification is a longstanding issue in scientific publishing. Currently there are a number of systems under development that promise a variety of functionalities. I am not going to give here an extensive overview of this wide range of systems, an up to date article can be found here. While a universally recognized standard such as the ISO standard International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) system will undoubtedly be useful as a way to categorize any type of authors, artists and scientists, the practical use of an author identifier will be strongly related to the availability of linked information such as lists of publications.

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Like many of my colleagues I get tens and tens of emails per day. My estimate is that about one quarter of is spam that by definition cannot be caught by any spam filter. I really get irritated by receiving these emails. I will give a few examples that I got today: (i) a the Journal of Chemical Physics with an email containing news flashes about recent developments and (ii) the Belgian funding organization FWO with an issue of their periodical newsletter. And also the Dutch science funding organizations STW and NWO send me regularly unsolicited emails.

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When you start your career as a postgraduate student, it is normal that you start collecting your scientific results in a slightly unorganized way. However as time proceeds, some basic rules are needed to keep track of your work. Every scientist has to develop his own systems for keeping organized. Ideally, a minimal set of rules should be used consistently by group members, including staff members and students, to facilitate data exchange. Perhaps some aspects appear trivial, but in my contact with undergraduate and postgraduate students I have seen many shocking examples of (lack of) data management. Here I give an example of how to organize data using a Windows operating system, based on my own set of rules. Again it should be emphasized that this is just one example of an organizational structure, which is aimed at avoiding some of the most common mistakes.

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