In the world of scholarly publishing, products and services are often described as an “ecosystem”. So let’s do some Biology.

But there really is a web of publishers, platforms, institutions, identifiers, and users. So what if we introduced a natural history approach to digital identity: treating sign in systems, submission portals, dashboards, and identifiers as species that have evolved, interact, compete, and co-adapt across habitats like academic institutions, publisher platforms, and research communities.

Ecology

Ecology is the branch of biology that studies the relationships between living organisms and their environment — including both biotic (living) and abiotic (non-living) components. It focuses on interactions, energy flow, population dynamics, competition, cooperation, and adaptation.

Here, we’re mapping interactions, roles, adaptations in the identity infrastructure.

  • Organisms = identity systems, platforms, users
  • Environment = protocols, standards, institutional infrastructure, funding requirements, usage patterns

Ecosystem

An ecosystem is a specific unit or system within ecology. It’s a self-regulating network of organisms and their physical environment, functioning as a unit through flows of energy and matter.

Ecosystems include:

  • Producers (e.g. plants — in digital terms, IdPs or credential issuers)
  • Consumers (e.g. animals — in digital terms, SPs or users)
  • Decomposers (e.g. bacteria — in digital terms, maybe data auditors or loggers?)
  • Flows of energy, nutrients, or in your case — identity, trust, and metadata

Ecosystem refers to specific configurations of systems and users — e.g. “the Elsevier ecosystem”, “the academic publishing ecosystem”, or “the ORCID-funder interoperability ecosystem”.

Defining the Taxonomy

We classify the components of the identity ecosystem into three major groups:

Identity Providers

Systems that assert identity, telling other services who a person is and what attributes they carry.

  • Institutional IdPs: Run by universities, often using SAML and part of federations
  • Centralised IdPs: Run by commercial or non-profit actors (e.g. Google, ORCID)
  • Self-sovereign IdPs: Emerging decentralised approaches where users hold and present credentials directly (e.g. digital wallets).

Service Providers

Systems that consume identity assertions to provide services. Each type is a distinct functional species:

  • Content platforms: Journal websites, repositories, ebook libraries
  • Submission systems: Platforms for manuscript submission and tracking
  • Peer review systems: Interfaces for assigning and managing reviewers
  • Author services: APC payment, editing, production portals
  • Analytics dashboards: Author-level metrics and impact visualisation
  • Funding application systems: Grant submission and review portals
  • Institutional admin tools: Librarian/funder reporting, usage tracking

Identity-Bearing Agents (Users)

Individuals who carry identities and engage with the ecosystem. Their roles are dynamic and shaped by system design:

  • Readers: Access content, sometimes anonymously
  • Authors: Submit, claim, and edit scholarly work
  • Reviewers: Evaluate submissions, sometimes pseudonymously
  • Editors: Manage workflows, assign roles, make decisions
  • Librarians/Admins: Manage institutional relationships and reporting
  • Students/New Researchers: Developing identity across platforms
  • Guests/Unaffiliated users: Limited or alternative identity pathways
  • Fraud actors: Exploit weak verification or fragmented roles

Ecosystems and Habitats

Each system operates within a broader habitat: publisher platforms, academic institutions, funder infrastructure. Service providers of the same type often evolve differently depending on their host environment.

For example, a submission system may support federated login in one publisher’s ecosystem but rely on email/password in another. This is akin to phenotypic plasticity — a species expressing different traits in different environments.

Interoperability as an Evolutionary Trait

A core way to compare identity systems is by their interoperability — their ability to integrate and interoperate across ecosystems. Key traits include:

  • Federated login support (e.g. SAML, eduGAIN)
  • ORCID integration (login, claim, assertion)
  • Guest or pseudonymous access options
  • Persistent identifiers across platforms
  • Role-awareness and switching (e.g. reviewer ↔ author)
  • Metadata handling (e.g. affiliation, department)

These traits define a system’s ecological fitness and determine its ability to participate in multi-species identity interactions.

Patterns of Interaction

The ecosystem contains rich interactions:

  • Mutualism: ORCID linking across funders and publishers
  • Parasitism: Trackers that extract data without giving value
  • Invasive dominance: Commercial identity providers displacing federated options
  • Drift and duplication: Parallel identity systems causing user confusion

Understanding these dynamics helps in assessing resilience, redundancy, and systemic fragility.

Functional Classification Over Branding

Rather than sorting systems by brand (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer), this model focuses on function:

  • Any manuscript submission system is a member of the same species, regardless of publisher.
  • The same goes for access platforms, peer review tools, or analytics dashboards.

This functional view allows for cross-publisher comparison and clearer thinking about architectural roles, duplication, and gaps.

Tinbergen’s Four Questions for Identity Systems

One of the most frequently asked questions in life and work is “why?” Why does this thing exist? Why does that happen? Why is that the answer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinbergen’s_four_questions

Four questions…

  • Causation (Mechanism): How does it actually work?
  • Function (Adaptive Value): What’s the advantage of it working that way?
  • Evolution (Phylogeny): How did it get to be like that?
  • Development (Ontogeny): How was it built?

x

  • Causation: The lens of the eye focuses light on the retina
  • Function: To find food and avoid danger.
  • Evolution: The vertebrate eye initially developed with a blind spot.
  • Development: neurons need light stimulation to wire themselves to the brain.

y

  • Causation: What immediate processes, structures, or interactions make the system behave this way?
  • Function: How does this behaviour or structure contribute to the system’s effectiveness or survival?
  • Evolution: What’s the historical lineage of this system or behaviour? What earlier forms did it evolve from?
  • Development: How is it built or acquired? How does it develop across the lifespan of a user or a platform?

This framework brings consistency and depth to system analysis.

Why It Matters

Digital identity in scholarly publishing is fragmented, inconsistent, and often invisible to users. This makes systems hard to reason about, hard to improve, and easy to exploit.

By borrowing tools from ecology and evolutionary biology, we can:

  • Describe identity systems more coherently
  • Understand functional relationships across infrastructure
  • See how users evolve and interact with services
  • Expose gaps and misalignments
  • Support healthier, more interoperable ecosystems

This field guide is one way to begin.