Authorship Markup worth it for "invisible" authors

[CleverPhD]

Greetings everyone!

Background

I help run multiple continuing education sites for Allied Health professionals.  Our editors do a great job of getting some of the best authors in their respective fields to come onto the site and present webinars and we publish articles around those presentations.

I would love to be able to use the rel=author tag on these sites as the authors we use help to improve our credibility when a user is on the site and I would like to take advantage of this in the SERPs.

The issue is that while most of these authors are leaders in their respective fields and have published in many academic publications, they are not on Facebook or Twitter, let alone Google+.  Also, they are probably not interested in setting up a G+ profile. They are "famous" and well published within their fields, yet they are somewhat  "invisible" on the web.

We are looking to implement author bios on our site and then could use the rel=author tag internally so that seems like a good first step.

The question is then around linking out with rel=me to any profiles (FB, Twitter, G+) The issue is that, as I mentioned above, the online profiles are pretty scarce.

Question / Discussion

1. Is it worth it to setup all the authorship markup to internal bios on a site when many of the authors are "invisible" on G+, twitter, FB, etc. and so I will be limited in how I can link rel=me to those profiles.

2. If the Google+ profile is not available for an author, what do you prefer to link to.  Would you say FB over Twitter as FB has more users, or if a user has both profiles, but uses twitter more often, would you link to the Twitter profile instead?

Many of these authors work at the university and have a bio page on the university website, would it be working linking to that profile?  How do you judge the "best" place to link to if there is no Google+ profile.

Thanks!

[edwardrj]

Setting up an internal author bio would be, in my opinion, a credibility enhancer for the particular article/story; however, in order to take advantage of Google's Authorship feature in the SERPs, the author would need to have a Google+ profile. So essentially, I don't think setting up the profiles would have much (if any) benefit from a search engine perspective.

If the authors set up a Google+ profile in the future, you could always integrate it at a later time.