[Taxacom] Open review as a wiki

Richard Pyle deepreef at bishopmuseum.org
Thu Apr 3 06:15:15 CDT 2008 

One very simple thing we can all do is include within the bibliographies of
our publications the full citations for the original descriptions of all
names included anywhere in the article (including genera).  It should soon
become easier and easier to track these citations down, as various online
resources get going (already is easy for those lucky groups with roubust
nomenclators).

We should also pressure our non-taxonomist brethren to do the same, even for
works on ecology, behavior, etc.  If taxonomic authors had been properly
cited as such all along, we would be among the most cited biologicts in any
fields.

Aloha,
Rich

> -----Original Message-----
> From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu 
> [mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Donat Agosti
> Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2008 9:21 PM
> To: TAXACOM at MAILMAN.NHM.KU.EDU
> Cc: Bjarte.Jordal at zmb.uib.no; Frank.Krell at dmns.org
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Open review as a wiki
> 
> 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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