[Taxacom] motivating data publication

[Dave Roberts]

Dear Doug & taxacomers all,

the Scratchpad project (http://scratchpads.eu) is, at its heart, a  
data publishing environment.  You can indeed get an authorship  
citation from the panels page, but not a DOI, but you do get a stable  
url for the page as viewed.  We are working towards an API that will  
make the data recoverable by aggregation tools.

Some folks have used a Scratchpad to create a journal (e.g. http://e-m-b.org 
).

The only issue is whether there is a site to which your data can be  
sensibly attached.  There is a Scratchpads devoted to bees (http://globalbees.editwebrevisions.info 
) which is devoted to building a global checklist, but could also  
accommodate additional information if the site owner agreed.

And they're free.

Cheers,  Dave
--
On 19 May 2009, at 18:49, Doug Yanega wrote:

> By coincidence, someone over on the entomo-l listserv just asked -
> essentially - about the merits of publishing a very tiny data set (in
> his case, a description of a single bee nest, presumably for a
> species whose nests are presently undescribed). This ties in
> logically with the topic of Mark's paper (allow me to paraphrase my
> pertinent comments from that other listserv):
>
> What would be nice to know is whether there is any journal (print or
> electronic) that publishes natural history data that has no page
> charges and handles submissions and reviews electronically and with
> fast turnaround; having a streamlined venue for publication of such
> data could potentially be a major boost to the field (assuming, of
> course, that people are getting trustworthy expert species
> identifications), since not many potential contributors are going to
> want to incur significant expense to publish a two- or three-page
> note.
> [chomp]

-- 
Dr D.McL. Roberts,        Tel: +44 (0)20 7942 5086
European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy Project,
Ccordinator WorkPackage 6 (Unifying Revisionary Taxonomy),
Dept. Zoology,
The Natural History Museum,
Cromwell Road,
London        SW7 5BD
Great Britain             Email: dmr at nomencurator.org
Web page:  http://www.editwebrevisions.info/
Web page:  http://www.e-taxonomy.eu/
--
"If you really don't believe in evolution, use last year's 'flu  
vaccine"  Kate Smurthwaite, 'Apes like me' Edinburgh Festival 2008
--