[Taxacom] Important follow-up regarding Nabu Press, etc.

[Doug Yanega]

A few tidbits from various places have been coming in, and an 
interesting pattern has emerged.

After checking on a variety of insect taxa on Amazon for Nabu Press 
items, I had originally done a quick search in other areas of 
zoology, and only noted the volume of Nabu offerings, for all of the 
non-insect keywords I tried (e.g., 209 results for "Nabu Press 
ornithology"). After having received some messages regarding negative 
findings of recent works being pirated, and other messages about 
metadata problems, I started looking closer, and must admit that I 
have yet to find any non-entomological works by Nabu that are not 
pre-1923, and no one has written to me reporting such cases (exactly 
the contrary - I've gotten a few messages saying there is nothing of 
recent vintage among the many Nabu offerings on topic X). I'm now 
suspicious that this may be a more limited offense than I had 
previously thought - limited to entomological publications, at least 
in terms of recent, copyrighted works being advertised and sold as 
pre-1923 works. PLEASE, if anyone is aware of non-entomological works 
of this sort, let me know. This could be very important in tracking 
down how and why these works came to be on Nabu's publishing list.

In essence, there is circumstantial evidence that it may have been as 
restricted a cause as a single large "contaminated" source of bad 
metadata - hundreds or thousands of documents, thematically unified, 
and all incorrectly tagged as being copyright-free. There are 
definitely single sources like this which have supplied large digital 
entomology archives to IA and/or BHL, and leads are being pursued 
even now. Several documents appearing in the Internet Archive, 
including the one for which I was co-author, do indeed show up with 
no indication of copyright, or a mistaken listing stating 
"NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT" (the entry for my paper). This could explain a LOT.

Accordingly, it looks like my initial broad warning about the scale 
may have been a mistake, based on the apparently unique source of the 
mislabeled files in circulation: some entomology literature 
digitization effort. It's still bad, but it may affect a lot fewer 
genuinely copyrighted documents than I'd supposed. So, I'm not quite 
as bad as Chicken Little, but it looks like I should apologize for 
casting such a broad net, if it turns out that only entomological 
works are affected.

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