[Taxacom] OMG! OMG! Run for your lives! End of the World!

[Nicola Nicolson]

Thanks Rod for your comments. 

As posted on your blog - we regard this as a pilot to explore the possible approaches to electronic publication.  We are working with our existing systems which were not designed with this in mind, but we wanted to support this important initiative.

Addressing your main points.

1. The names aren't in IPNI
Yes they are.  We added the names to IPNI in January and provided the IPNI LSID to the authors and editors.  These names are suppressed pending effective publication, so they cannot be found by searches using the name, only by identifier.  
The plan is to unsuppress these records in IPNI once the paper copy arrives with the Editors.  Perhaps we should unsuppress at the time of effective publication, without the paper copy.  However, we have had previous experiences of people notifying IPNI that names had been effectively published, but this proving not to be the case.  At this stage in trying to advance electronic publication, we wanted to maintain our precedent of listing names that we had hard copy evidence of being effectively published.  Depending on experiences we can adapt our practices.

2. The LSIDs state the record has been deleted
This is true and we realize confusing.  IPNI does not truly delete anything; it only suppresses it from public view.  Such suppressed records may include duplicates or genuine mistakes.  We don’t currently have a way to distinguish names that are pending effective publication, so to keep these records from public view we used an existing status for this pilot.
We have changed the content of the LSID metadata to use isRestricted which better reflects IPNI working practices, and now include some explanatory text:   
"The full metadata for this record is not available to view as it is suppressed. This may be because (1) The record is not yet effectively published according to the ICBN rules or (2) The record is incorrect or a duplicate."
In the future we plan to better distinguish the reasons for suppression.

3. The LSIDs can't be resolved by the means stated in the paper
Sorry, things went wrong.  Two reasons: 
 i. In proof reading we should have spotted that the prefix supplied with LSIDs should have read www.ipni.org rather than ipni.org
 ii. Both formats should have worked anyway, and they both now do.

cheers,
Nicky

- Nicola Nicolson
- Science Applications Development,
- Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew,
- Richmond, Surrey, TW9 3AB, UK
- email: n.nicolson at rbgkew.org.uk
- phone: 020-8332-5712
________________________________________
From: Roderic Page [r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk]
Sent: 06 May 2010 08:40
To: TAXACOM
Cc: Jim Croft; s.knapp at nhm.ac.uk; Nicola Nicolson
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] OMG! OMG! Run for your lives! End of the World!

Pity that with such a milestone in botanical taxonomy, none of the
informatics works. The names aren't in IPNI, the LSIDs have no data,
and the stated means for resolving the LSIDs fails (appending them to http://ipni.org/
  gets a 404). See http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2010/05/linnaeus-meets-internet-plos-botany.html
  for details.

Given that the whole point of this paper is to promote electronic
publication of names, it's unfortunate that none of the links to names
actually work (as of now).

Regards

Rod


On 5 May 2010, at 23:12, Jim Croft wrote:

> http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100505/full/news.2010.221.html?s=news_rss
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---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
DEEB, FBLS
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University of Glasgow
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