[Taxacom] ZooBank reality check

[Bob Mesibov]

Re the fungi and ant scanning/distributing projects:

A leading authority in my field, who edits a specialist journal, has flatly
refused to allow the journal to be made available in PDF form. He wrote:

"Not sympathetic with the idea of making the contents (text) available free
to everybody in the world. Over the years I have paid for over half the
printing and postal costs, and work on the principle that people do not
value anything that is free. I think that users should shoulder some of the
cost of production, even if only a few actually ever buy parts or subscribe
to the thing by volume."

A second authority also refuses to let his published work be digitised.
Further, after I had scanned a large number of his illustrations (vital in
this particular group's taxonomy) and formatted them for a taxonomic
website, I was told by the authority that he didn't want them to be used in
this way. He regards some uses of his work as outright plagiarism and wants
taxonomists and others to go to his original publications.

I'm wondering whether something similar has happened in the ant and fungi
literature digitising, and if so, how these gaps in the digitised literature
are handled by your bibliographic portals.
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Dr Robert Mesibov
Honorary Research Associate, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery
and School of Zoology, University of Tasmania
Home contact: PO Box 101, Penguin, Tasmania, Australia 7316
(03) 64371195; 61 3 64371195

Tasmanian Multipedes
http://www.qvmag.tas.gov.au/zoology/multipedes/mulintro.html
Spatial data basics for Tasmania
http://www.utas.edu.au/spatial/locations/index.html
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