[Taxacom] Why Taxonomy does NOT matter

Fri Apr 22 01:23:24 CDT 2011

well ... firstly, there is at least good abstract availability for most current 
journals that are not OA, so that is something ...

secondly, I rather think that we let medical doctors do medicine, 
astrophysicists do astrophysics, and taxonomists look after taxonomy, so it is 
the availability of content to taxonomists that matters the most, not the 
availability of content to nontaxonomists ...

but, again, I make the point that I too am in favour of OA, but I am still a 
little lost regarding its alleged relevance of OA to the subject of this thread 
... we seem to be off on a tangent ...

Stephen

________________________________
From: Donat Agosti <agosti at amnh.org>
To: Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>; Kenneth Kinman 
<kennethkinman at webtv.net>; taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Sent: Fri, 22 April, 2011 6:08:35 PM
Subject: RE: [Taxacom] Why Taxonomy does NOT matter

Your point just shows the misunderstanding of the Internet and IT developments. 
We are NOT anymore in the Gutenbergian age where one publications is being read 
by human after the other, be it as print of pdf.  We talk about access to 
content. A conservationist wants to have access to species X or on a region y. 
He wants just those bits of information. If all the publications are open access 
then he can find those bits, not just its metadata. Knoweldge management is 
increasingly allowing us addressing such questions efficiently. Clearly, we are 
not there yet. But in the biomedical world there are close to 20M abstracts 
accessible and a very interesting science developed to make use of it. It also 
became clear, that this is not enough and thus the requirement in the US that 
NIH funded publications have to be open access.

Open access is thus  a main barrier for the development of such systems.

As a person on the street I am also not interested in the taxonomic article, or 
in fact a book. I am interested in taxonomic literature on treatments. And from 
there I have further questions. I want to see images in my case of specimens, or 
DNA sequences. I want to be able to now more about a character and thus have 
access to an ontology. Or I want to know more about an author. With other words, 
I want to have interlinked data. Publications are just a vehicle to create this 
content that become, ones their content is accessible just a little piece in a 
huge mosaic in which I am interested. And as your example shows, this is just 
one way to look at the world. But with access to content, there is an unlimited 
number of such ways. Luckily we have developments such as BHL that will allow 
part of it. Unfortunately we keep creating barriers to a lot of the modern 
literature, and thus make it for the time being obsolete in such a framework.

Donat

From:Stephen Thorpe [mailto:stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz] 
Sent: Friday, April 22, 2011 3:34 AM
To: Donat Agosti; Kenneth Kinman; taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Why Taxonomy does NOT matter

Donat,

Well, if I were to wander down the main street of Auckland City, offering free 
reprints of taxonomic articles to the general (non-taxonomic) public, I don't 
think I would get much interest! Initiatives like Wikispecies and EoL seem to 
provide the sort of free information that non-taxonomists want (and these 
initiatives may have other good functions as well as just that). I really don't 
know how you can seriously say that 'knowledge that is not online and open 
accessible does not exist'? I have heard you described as what one might call a 
"technophile", which is fine, but it just means that your views in some areas 
are somewhat "extreme". I have said several times that I have no problem at all 
with barcoding in its proper place as one taxonomic tool, but there is still a 
great deal of taxonomic work needing to be done which does not require it. I 
would say that 99% of barcoding is not known to be "important" for anything 
either! It is simply economics that is fuelling the machine. As something of an 
analogy, although Bill Gates may be one of the 3 richest people in the world, I 
don't think many of us would want to call him one of the 3 most valuable and 
important people in the world! If you and he both had life-threatening injuries, 
would you say to the paramedics "no, see to him first, he is far more important 
and valuable than I am"??

Stephen

________________________________

From:Donat Agosti <agosti at amnh.org>
To: Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>; Kenneth Kinman 
<kennethkinman at webtv.net>; taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Sent: Thu, 21 April, 2011 7:23:10 PM
Subject: RE: [Taxacom] Why Taxonomy does NOT matter

Sorry Stephen, you can always explain what people do and justify it. Just 
continue doing this, but finish mourning your dismal situation. Who cares 
whether a taxonomists invests his money into buying other rerprints: The problem 
is that the non-taxonomist will NOT pay for it, he will not even searach for it, 
unless you offer her something on a silver platter. And that we can do (but most 
of us don’t). The fact is that knowledge that is not online and open accessible 
does not exist, especially in a field that is so important as biodiversity and 
its conservation.

The fact that 99% of biodiversity is not really known to be important for 
anything, but 1% is important (eg Malaria)  because it is where a lot of money 
is being invested, is just another indication that those interested in it want 
to have tools to identify in the simplest and most reliable way whether a 
mosquito is dangerous or not, whether a fruit fly is a pest or not. And Barcode 
in many way promise to do this. And it is also a fact that those barcodes are 
linked to our and other data.

That the barcoders can convince funding agencies to do this far beyond the 1% 
has not least to do with the way the sell their product and how they are 
organized. May be it’s time to look into this and collaborate – or in the sense 
of many of the fellows of this list subjugate the barcoders into taxonomy to the 
proper place where it belongs with their own successful strategy.

Donat

From:Stephen Thorpe [mailto:stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz] 
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2011 11:30 AM
To: Donat Agosti; Kenneth Kinman; taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Why Taxonomy does NOT matter

Donat,
Firstly, unless you forbid traditional taxonomic publishing in favour of *only* 
open access electronic publication (which nobody to my knowledge has seriously 
proposed), there are always going to be some journals that are not open access 
electronic. 

>Why else is the overwhelming part of Zootaxa closed to the public?
the answer to that is simple: because either you charge the author and give the 
reader free access (open access), or you charge the reader and let the author 
publish for free. Zootaxa chooses the second option, on the premiss that it 
supports taxonomy by supporting taxonomists. It is the most straightforward 
option. If I want a piece of artwork painted by an artist, then I have to pay 
them for it. I don't get it for free and charge it back to the artist! In 
practice, most taxonomic works are only directly relevant to a few specialists, 
and they can get hold of them for free without too much difficulty, or charge it 
to research budgets, but the amount of money involved is small, so it does no 
harm (not to be confused with the amount of money paid for subscriptions to 
journals, but that is another matter). Taxonomists who don't have to pay to get 
published presumably have more money to spend on obtaining other taxonomist's 
articles. It is not clear if open access results in more money for taxonomists 
to spend on research, and not clear if anyone who needs to know really misses 
out through not being able to pay for access. At any rate, my main point here is 
that if taxonomy does NOT matter, then barcoding and phylogenetics matter EVEN 
LESS, because they depend on taxonomy as a foundation. Barcoding might look like 
a booming industry, but the boxes coming off the production line are all empty 
...
Cheers,
Stephen

________________________________

From:Donat Agosti <agosti at amnh.org>
To: Kenneth Kinman <kennethkinman at webtv.net>; taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Sent: Thu, 21 April, 2011 6:00:48 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Why Taxonomy does NOT matter

What I like about barcode: I can look at it.
What I do not like about taxonomy: I cannot look at species descriptions.

There are approximately 17,000 new species described and a multitude of
redescriptions. They are not only not available, because in print or
copyrighted but to a very little elite, but they are also in the wrong
format: In journals not as treatments.

In today's digital Internet world we do want to get to get to the item of
interest as straight as possible and in taxonomy those are the taxonomic
treatments of the taxa. But our community trots along as usual publishing
the same way we did since 1758 in Zoology, which was then the same that
Plato and others did a bit earlier. Few changed, such as Zookeys, or in fact
EOL or species-id that provide taxon-based access.
A taxonomic treatment is more than just verbatim that so many are happy to
read in pdf, one at once, shipped to you by a colleague by email (a bit
faster than the reprints ten years ago). It can be a document that is very
rich because it has live link to external resources; it could be formatted
in a way that machine could use it and reuse it for your particular purpose.
Unfortunately, it is not just the publisher, but the authors who do not want
to make their publication disseminated as widely as possible. Why else is
the overwhelming part of Zootaxa closed to the public?

The  taxonomists have not the product that is appealing to outside funding.
Rod page in his blog about the post-taxonomic age is right, the facts point
towards the irrelevance of taxonomy - in a time where it could have its
rival thanks to all what the digital revolution has to offer, and that is
not least open access. And is this not at the core of science: be able to
criticize. 
We can say that I do not believe in a BarCode, because you do not just have
the one but its context to work with. We cannot do this in taxonomy in
general, and that's part of the current tragedy why taxonomy does NOT
matter.

Donat

-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Kenneth Kinman
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2011 6:52 AM
To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Why Taxonomy does NOT matter

Hi Stephen,
        Good point.  A lot of these debates are the result of swinging
the pendulum too far one way or the other.  In the process, moderation
and eclectism gets overlooked.  Sounds sort of like the United States
Congress, where moderates almost never get media attention, while
non-moderates (on both sides) get almost all the media attention.  
        As for barcoding in particular, I believe it has great potential
as an identification tool, but that it could become counter-productive
if too loosely applied to species taxonomy across the board.  Therefore,
it could sometimes be misused, especially in the area of oversplitting
of populations as full species which are not otherwise warranted.  Not
that barcoding can't uncover undiscovered cryptic species which are
morphologically extremely similar, but there is still the problem that
some researchers will go far overboard on the oversplitting where it is
unwarranted.        
      So it seems advisable to develop the potential of barcoding as an
identification tool.  But we should also be careful that it not be
misused by some who are tempted to use its potential inappropriately and
splitting taxonomically where it is not carefully backed up by other
data.  The question is whether barcoding, or other molecular
initiatives, could be getting more than their fair share of funding at
the expense of more traditional morphological taxonomy!!!  If there is
only a limited funding pie avail, there are going to be squabbles over
how that pie is spent.        
        ----------Ken Kinman      
P.S.  Frankly I think that taxonomic pie is far too small compared to
that of astronomers in general.  Protecting Earth from possible asteroid
collisions is one thing, but a lot of astronomy spending would (in my
opinion) be better spent on preserving species on Earth.  NASA probably
wastes a lot on things with little benefit.  
        But then even that is probably minor compared to the billions
diverted into corporate welfare.  And most such large corporations seem
more concerned with excess profits (which are largely unearned) than
they are with their consumers or even their own employees (except for a
few of their excessively paid CEOs).  Corporations also seem to be
feeding the obscene salaries paid to major league sports figures and
also many Wall Streeters sitting on their butts playing computers with
other people's money (especially those at the top of that hierarchy).
Wealth trickles up, far more than it trickles down.  

----------------------------------------------------------
Stephen Thorpe wrote:  
    we shouldn't lose sight here of the actual criticisms of
barcoding: the criticism isn't that barcoding is good for nothing, nor
that taxonomy should stay rooted in the past, but rather that taxonomy
underpins barcoding and cladistics, etc., yet people seem to be losing
interest in this foundation, and yet somehow seem to think that we
should spend all our time and resources on barcoding, cladistics, or
whatever else is flavour of the day, and make taxonomy itself into a
dried up old museum specimen ...

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