[Taxacom] Centrally supported electronic archive

Sun May 24 07:20:11 CDT 2009

Why couldn't one take advantage of existing cyber infrastructure? We
have in place Zoobank to register names and could keep track of
nomenclatural history. We have PubMed which stores article and
citation information and has built tools for searching. Why not put
publications on pubmed and link to the pubmed page on Zoobank.

It get irritating and overburdening to have gazillions of databases
and new projects start up with their own info and their own way to
store and display it, when we have existing infrastructure that works,
has been tested and more or less has become (or will become) the
standard.

Whether all taxonomic publications are free to access is another
matter. At least the citation info and abstract are available to see
on PubMed. It seems to me a more important matter to ensure free and
open online access to species descriptions and revisions. The archive
and repository would naturally follow.

Lets move taxonomy in the 21st century!

Best Regards, Kevin

On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 9:41 PM, Karen Wilson
<Karen.Wilson at rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au> wrote:
> A centrally supported archive (or set of mirrored archives) like Genbank would be ideal, Doug.
>
> Question is: how do we achieve that?
> I don't know how Genbank got started, but I'm sure others on TAXACOM will know. Is it a model we could follow? And what about central archives in other disciplines such as physics and astronomy?
>
> Regards
> Karen W
>
> __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
> Karen L. Wilson, AM  |  Special Botanist Plant Diversity Section  |  National Herbarium of NSW  |  Botanic Gardens Trust  |  Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney, Mrs Macquaries Road, SYDNEY NSW 2000, AUSTRALIA Adjunct Assoc Prof University of New England Secretary-General XVIII IBC Organising Committee - July 2011
> Phone: +61 2 9231 8137  |  Fax: +61 2  9251 7231  |  email: karen.wilson at rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au  |  website: www.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au
>
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>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Doug Yanega
> Sent: Saturday, 23 May 2009 3:16 PM
> To: TAXACOM at MAILMAN.NHM.KU.EDU
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] ICZN position on Darwinius
>
> Geoff Read wrote:
>
>>PS. On reading some of the blogging, some by list members, I see blithe
>>talk suggesting the publisher start altering the original as a realistic
>>solution. Wow! Slippery slope! What if it's done in a less high profile
>>situations? How do we know? How do we prove it? And yet another checking
>>task for careful taxonomists.
>>
>>An illustration of a severe problem with electronic pub, IMO.  But maybe
>>I'm too untrusting.
>
> If this approach seems untrustworthy, maybe that's because it IS
> untrustworthy - meaning we need to find a better way. Though I'm
> certain to sound like the proverbial broken record, there IS a
> straightforward way to ensure that any digital documents the
> taxonomic community might rely upon *are* an authoritative, original
> version.
>
> ARCHIVE THEM IMMEDIATELY IN A PERMANENTLY-SUPPORTED CENTRAL
> REPOSITORY LIKE GENBANK.
>
> Once again, if we allow anyone to "archive" their own digital
> documents, then we guarantee the entire taxonomic enterprise will
> fail. Half-measures will, I truly believe, be ultimately worthless.
>
> Which do you think will still be readily available to the scientific
> community in, say, 300 years? The digital versions of sequence data
> in Genbank, or the *print* versions? OH, wait...Genbank sequence data
> doesn't HAVE print versions. Are the folks at Genbank insane? I think
> not. In fact, maybe we could learn something really important from
> their example...
>
> Sincerely,
> --
>
> Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
> Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314        skype: dyanega
> phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
>              http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
>   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
>         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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-- 
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