a dream work: online counter for new species...

[Steve.Shattuck at CSIRO.AU]

For credit to work, you'll need to be able to quantify individual
contributions.  You'll need a system where you get statistics like "J.
Bloggs contributed 340 taxon record updates during 2003 out of a total
of 5798 updates received".  Not unlike the ISI Citation Impact numbers.
For people to contribute in a meaningful way (rather than just now and
then, or on weekends) this sort of metadata will need to be part of
these systems.  

And reviewers/line managers will need to be able to get an idea of the
impact these contributions make.  If a web site gets 100 million hits a
year contributors should get more "credit" than those contributing to a
site getting half a million hits a year.  It's like publishing in Nature
compared to grey literature.  And we can't really do this now.



-----Original Message-----

Your comment was informative, though I think there's a misunderstanding.
What I meant by "credit" was something that could be used as leverage
to, e.g., apply for a position, or secure funding, directly advance
one's scientific career, and so on. Print publications can rather
immediately achieve this for taxonomists, and exclusive internet
publications - however well credited to an author and lasting - aren't
(yet,
unfortunately) as powerful in that department.