[Taxacom] Nature: access to scientific publications and results

[Donat Agosti]

Once again, Nature did it. Whilst we talk about LSIDs, guids, dois, Nature
is offering an archive where dois and handles are given to any of your
scientific work. The idea is to help to foster scientific exchange. So, you
could for example add all your publications for which you didn't sign an
exclusive licence to the publishers and thus it will become part of the
growing digital world.

A comment is given at O'Reilly's radar
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/06/nature_precedin.html

The question behind this, similar to flickr and youtube is, that these are
at the end all private enterprises which lay outside our control, and I
wonder how wise it is from our funding fathers (science foundations etc.) to
let this happen without having some sort of control mechanisms, or do it by
themselves. This sort of accumulation of knowledge are certainly one of the
pillars of research.

We all talk about community, democracy but with that we all work towards
single institutions which are exactly the opposite of what we envision.
Google is scanning an enormous amount of books at their cost, but do we
really have access to its content, or can we build api to mine or use it the
way we envision? No. Who can profit from our joint input into tagging things
- certainly a novel feature in understanding our behavior?

Despite all this, we should make usage of this offer. Add your old
publication on Nature precdings, add the bibliographic references to
Connotea, but let's use this to demonstrate to our funders and our congress
men and women, that these instiutions need be part of our science
infrastructure, because we actually use it.

Donat