[Taxacom] Who uses biodiversity data and why? A few thoughts... guids

[Donat Agosti]

    Finally, thanks to Rod Page for helping to bring Phyloinformatics 
back from the grave - especially since I took a risk and published a 
paper in that journal.  The discussion here shows that our ability to 
act collectively to save past works is maybe much easier now than 
before, if we have the will to act.

->I think we ought to abandon our "feel of collectivity" to include "us
systematists" and consider us as part of the "science community at large".
Since our discoveries are at the base of so many other sciences, there is
another reason to assure we are open. As pointed out in earlier messages,
there are global approaches to solve the problem of access and archiving our
papers: Open access and self archiving.
 
Again, since we consider our science to be at the base of so many problems,
ie the saving of planet Earth, we have to follow suit "open access", urge
our publishers of the thousand journals with systematics data in them to
allow self archiving or go open access, urge our institutions to cover the
costs for the self archives, and support our national science foundations
and other research funding bodies to implement a mandate to self archive.

The AMNH huge success with over 500,000 downloads of their 4,000 articles
within the first nine months of adoption of an open access strategy shows
clearly the impact the open access strategy has. 

Open access has also an additional benefit. We (and anybody outside
systematics even more so) rely for our work on the most relevant literature.
If the forthcoming Biodiversity Heritage Library does not find a way to
include all the new literature, it is being crippled and for most of the
users it will not help to find their answers they had, and which cold only
be answered by access to the most recent monographs. It is nice to be able
to read Linneus, but 99% of the users would rather read the most updated
description of taxonx.

Finally, I as a taxpayer do want to have access to the research I pay for.
The Internet allows me now to follow the advancement of science from home. I
do not need to go to the library and look up the hard copies. Self archiving
is one way to this open access, open access journals another way. Since we
get most of the material in our systematics work from the tropics, we can
not allow that we do not share our knowledge about their biodiversity.


Donat




Best regards, Rob Guralnick
Assistant Professor and Curator
Dept. of EEB and CU Museum
University of Colorado Boulder

*citation: Guralnick, R. P. and J. Van Cleve. 2005. Strengths and 
weaknesses of museum and national survey datasets for predicting 
regional species richness: Comparative and combined approaches. 
Diversity and Distributions 11(4):349-359. 
[http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bsc/ddi/2005/00000011/00000004/art000
09; 
DOI: 10.1111/j.1366-9516.2005.00164.x]//
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