[Taxacom] Open review as a wiki

Thu Apr 3 02:20:36 CDT 2008

I agree with Frank. Nobody would compare a Formula 1 race car with a
tractor, and it needs some discipline whilst sitting on a tractor for not
daydreaming on becoming a big super star 

It needs different metrics to measure their impacts.

It would be one of the most important contribution of the Encyclopedia of
Life's Cornerstone Institutions (Harvard, Field Museum, MBL, Mobot, SI) if
they would introduce a new metrics how to measure the impact of taxonomic
publications of their staff and use this in their assessments and promotion.

If Harvard does it, then many other institutions would look at it and copy
it. If Harvard would even begin to hire more taxonomists, the impact would
even be bigger.

If we as a community would decide we go all open access, create handles for
all our legacy publications so they could be cited and follow-up like dois
in journals, then we could also begin to measure who and how publications
are used.

If all the new taxa and articles are as well registered at institutions like
Zoobank or IPNI/Tropicos then we might not need just one journal, because
the 1,000 or so are virtually one.

If we all contribute to this, we do not need to wait for somebody up in the
sky doing this for us: many of your colleagues begin to make their
publications accessible on their own web sites - and hopefully more
institutions begin, like NIH, to request self deposition of articles they
funded.

If we could convince publishers to add taxonomy domain specific mark-up to
their publications, like the GBIF funded Zootaxa/Plazi/Zoobank project
experimenting with marking up in Taxonx their ca 300 fish, ant and
platygasteroid publications and expose them on a dedicated server (in this
case http://plazi.org for treatments and http://www.zoobank.org for names),
then we were much closer to actually measure the impact of our work, and if
well done the useage of single descriptions or even specimens.

If EOL would make use of this opportunity to get access to treatments, add
counters how often they have been accessed, then we not only would foster
access to these publications, but had a metrics our institutions could use
to measure our impact.

Donat

-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of
Frank.Krell at dmns.org
Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2008 2:58 AM
To: Bjarte.Jordal at zmb.uib.no; dyanega at ucr.edu
Cc: TAXACOM at MAILMAN.NHM.KU.EDU
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Open review as a wiki

The question is whether Thomson decides to consider the Unified
Cybertaxonomic Webjournal as source journal for tits Impact Factor. Zootaxa
is a good model. It has an impact factor, it is a somehow central journal
for taxonomy - and the impact factor is 0.612.
The IF doesn't work for taxonomy even if there is one central journal.
First, we don't have the critical mass of authors citing, and second only
the citations in the first and second year after a publication count for the
IF. Have a look at any taxonomical monograph and count how many citations
were from the two years preceding publication. This pattern won't change
significantly with a centralized web-journal. There will remain lots of
private society journals anyway besides the professional UCW.
Frank

Dr Frank T. Krell 
Curator of Entomology 
Editor, Systematic Entomology 
Commissioner, International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature 
Department of Zoology 
Denver Museum of Nature & Science 
2001 Colorado Boulevard 
Denver, CO 80205-5798 USA 
Frank.Krell at dmns.org 
Phone: (+1) (303) 370-8244 
Fax: (+1) (303) 331-6492 
http://www.dmns.org/main/en/General/Science/ScientificExperts/Biographies/kr
ellFrank.htm 

-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Bjarte Henry Jordal
Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2008 1:46 AM
To: Doug Yanega
Cc: TAXACOM at MAILMAN.NHM.KU.EDU
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Open review as a wiki

(2) If all taxonomy is published in a single
> source, then it will level the playing field for taxonomists AND give 
> the field more prominence; instead of dinosaur taxonomy being 
> published in journals with an IF of 40, while most other taxonomic 
> journals are no higher than a 2, everyone would suddenly be 
> publishing in an online journal with an IF of 20-30 (because anyone 
> citing ANY taxonomic work would boost the rating for this one 
> resource; that's how IF works). That would *increase* the perception 
> of the value of taxonomy to science. 

This is something most people have not considered, myself included. The 
high IF is actually a quite likely outcome!

> Do you honestly believe it is better for them to learn that 
> AFTER spending a year of their life on it, when they could have been 
> told BEFORE they did so? Which is more embarrassing: being told you 
> made a mistake on day 1, or being told after months of labor? 
> Wouldn't you feel better as a reviewer *preventing* someone from an 
> embarrassing and time-consuming mistake rather than correcting them 
> long after the fact? Right now, a substantial number of new names 
> make it into print that are synonyms - how do 
> authors/reviewers/everyone else NOT benefit if, in the future, 
> would-be synonyms never make it past the first draft stage?
> 
yes, I agree that many reviewers at the early stage would be a good 
thing to avoid new synonymous taxa described, etc. But I still think 
that this kind of 'review' is better placed in a scrathpad environment 
that include all registered experts within e..g Curculionoideae, instead 
of combining the scrathpad stage with the actual taxonomy journal. 
Surely it is good for the author to save time, BUT, should the burden 
for lousy taxonomists be carried by the the good taxonomists, even 
though it may save time for the taxonomic community overall?

One other related issue:  mistakes are much less of a problem when 
publishing on-line. Instead of the traditional papers we are producing, 
in a real cybertaxonomy context we can revise group by group by adding 
new species, rewriting keys, changing status etc several times.

Bjarte

-- 
Bjarte H. Jordal, PhD

Associate Professor in Systematic Entomology
Museum of Natural History, University of Bergen
Musèplass 3
NO-5007 Bergen

Phone:  55582233
http://www.bio.uib.no/pages/forsker.php?pid=1481&lang=E

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