Electronic publishing

[Andrey Sharkov]

On Mon, 11 Mar 1996 Leonard Krishtalka  wrote:

>It is worth remembering however that the information recorded by all of the
>"extinct" technologies -- 78 rpm records, 8-track table, wax cylinder -- are
>being recovered and archived on CDs,

and  on Tue, 12 Mar 1996  George Schatz wrote:
>I think that we can be assured  (by whom? - A.S.) that the industry will
maintain backwards
>compatibility for CD technology.

     I think, that traditional publishing on paper still has few advantages:
the information doesn't need to be "recovered and archived" on different
media (I don't say it can't be), and we don't need to be assured by somebody
that the backward compatibility for old electronic media will be maintained.
Let's admit that the longevity of electronic media has not been proven yet.
And it's pointless to argue whether there will be a technology available to
read the information recorded on a CD in 100 years from now (in case it
wasn't transferred to a new media), or not. We may guess about that, but we
don't know.  We know, however, that there is no problem reading a book
published 100 (and many more) years ago. I don't think anybody will argue
with that. As to the longevity of  WWW sites and information stored on WWW
servers, I am sure that all of you have received messages like "Directory is
empty", "Document does not exist", or "Not Found. The requested object does
not exist on this server. The link you followed is either outdated,
inaccurate, or the server has been instructed not to let you have it."

    Taking all that in consideration, I am strongly against the SOLELY
electronic publishing of new taxon names, or taxanomic changes (new
synonyms, new combinations, Lectotype designations, etc.).

    However, I think that parallel publishing of a paper in a journal and on
WWW would be extremely helpful. In that case, the hard copy and the
electronic version should contain a note referencing each other. This will
help to dessiminate the information and make it more readily available to
scientific community. The electronic version can also be expanded to include
color illustrations, sounds, movies, etc. The only question that needs to be
addressed and solved is what should be accepted as a date of a publication
if its paper and electronic versions appear at different time? One of the
possible solution could be an agreement that the electronic version of a
paper should not be made available before its publication in a journal.


Andrey Sharkov
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Andrey Sharkov
Associate Curator                               Phone: (614) 292-2730
Department of Entomology                  FAX: (614) 292-7774
Museum of Biodiversity                       INTERNET:  Sharkov.1 at osu.edu
The Ohio State University                                          or
1315 Kinnear Rd.
asharkov at magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu
Columbus, OH 43212
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