Accounts can have multiple e-mail addresses. E-mail addy has to be verified. Corresponding author can be a field in a paper's description set by the link submitter (or later visitors to that paper's reffit).
The user whose email addy matches the corresponding author field can click "claim" on that paper, and then that user's activity is marked differently to indicate it's a comment/discussion point/ etc coming from the paper author.
Paper author can also assign one e-mail addy for each of the other paper authors in that paper's metadata.
This begins to build up a list of users who are actually published authors, without forcing any kind of ID verification during signup.
Found a solution that I think I like a lot:
Accounts can have multiple e-mail addresses. E-mail addy has to be verified. Corresponding author can be a field in a paper's description set by the link submitter (or later visitors to that paper's reffit).
The user whose email addy matches the corresponding author field can click "claim" on that paper, and then that user's activity is marked differently to indicate it's a comment/discussion point/ etc coming from the paper author.
Paper author can also assign one e-mail addy for each of the other paper authors in that paper's metadata.
This begins to build up a list of users who are actually published authors, without forcing any kind of ID verification during signup.