Electronic publishing

[Peter Rauch]

A bunch of taxacom'ers support electronic publishing to one degree or
another. The messages being posted are mostly urging ourselves to
believe it's possible, and to get on with it.

Perhaps some taxacom'ers do not support electronic publishing (in the
senses we've been discussing)? This brief note addresses the believers.

Let's start identifying what the requirements must be, and be satisfied
that we believe it can be done (partially or fully, as the requirements
are incrementally met). No more testimonials on the virtues of
e-publishing.

So, what are the requirements? For example, Jim R mentioned the nice
ability to make links among documents. OK. what infrastructure has
to be in place in order for an archived e-pub to find those links in
the future (when someone is attempting to read that e-pub) in
a way that will satisfy the systematics community? (Hint: universal,
unique, stable document ids is not a fact of life yet, so will that
link point to the pointless in some future? What's the consequence
to a systematics e-pub and to the sysetmatics community if a link does
become empty, or worse points to something other than the contemporaneous
document --_and_ perhaps the context in which _that_ linked document was
embedded?)

So, with regard to the "incremental" implementation of e-pubs, for example,
one might argue that a requirement be "e-pub, ok; but, no links until
that part of the puzzle is resolved", or some such strategy.

The list of "small" problems or requirements to resolve before our
community __knows__ that it is satisfying its e-pub needs is probably
very large.

For example...
> Date:         Tue, 12 Mar 1996 13:39:30 -0600
> From: George Schatz <schatz at MOBOT.ORG>
>
>  Archiving electronic publications is an
> issue that libraries must and are addressing.

That's one of the sectors of the writing/reading/archiving/access
community who is indeed addressing e-pub issues. The responsibility of
our systematics community is to assure ourselves that those addressing
the problem (it's _much_ bigger than Taxacom or Systematics ;>) ), are
taking into account our needs. By bet is that they are, even without
input from us, since I believe that in the aggregate the "publishing"
and "information" industry contains all the elements and requirements
that are bundled, perhaps uniquely, into the systematics' community
requirements. But, it wouldn't do any harm to get a finger on that
pulse, and reaffirm such confidence. Perhaps more an issue is the
relative priorities of systematics vis a vis the larger community
of publishing. It's no good if our most important requirement is
at the bottom of the rest of the communities' list.

And, most importantly, our internal checks and controls over
exploiting new publication technology will be addresses uniquely
by us, e.g., the Codes, which allow or not publication in selected
media.

> ...  But there is no reason why libraries cannot write
> an electronic "paper" to CD, along with other papers in an electronic
> journal, assign a call number, and put the CD on the shelf. Accessing
> such an archive is really no different than using a microfiche reader.

See the above comment about making sure that the "link" infrastructure
is in place before betting the barn on links.

> The time to move to "electronic publishing", to petition our
> professional societies to inaugurate electronic journals that would
> incorporate new species descrptions, is now.

Well, "petition" should probably read "...send a list of requirements
to..." and of course, we _are_ the society(s) who will have to
both generate and resolve/implement those requirements.

> George E. Schatz

BTW, it doesn't matter if my particular examples are not strong one; I
was asking rhetorically. If they're weak examples, I'll think harder
and come up with better ones --or we can all think up "requirements"
and come up with problems to resolve that those requirements will
surely evoke.

Adelante, compa~neros!
Peter Rauch