[Taxacom] Nature needs names: 60 new dragonflies from Africa

[Ellinor Michel]

Hi Rod

Your comments are valid, but surely directed to the authors! I posted this on their behalf, as I have more ready access to Taxacom posting at the moment. You might want to broaden the target your comments, as the story has been picked up by Science, and a number of other outlets. Overall, I'd say its terrific that some taxonomic groundwork is being celebrated.
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/12/explosion-new-dragonfly-species-results-animals-named-after-gorillas-pink-floyd

I'm just guessing, but there are likely to be constraints on publishing costs from the authors' perspective so that OA was not an option. Thus the focus of this kind of very constructive criticism on your part should be the administrations of the organisations that the authors work for, the science funding agencies, and the publishers.

In the meantime, this nice short publicity also does a nice job for publicising the topic, with beautiful photos
http://africageographic.com/blog/60-new-species-dragonflies-discovered-africa/

Cheers,
Ellinor

________________________________
From: Roderic Page [Roderic.Page at glasgow.ac.uk]
Sent: 11 December 2015 11:42
To: Ellinor Michel
Cc: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Nature needs names: 60 new dragonflies from Africa

Hi Ellinor,

While I applaud the effort, and the dragonflies are wonderful, it’s hard to applaud the way this paper has been published:

Does it in an open access journal? No
Does the article have a DOI so that it can be easily cited? No
Are the names registered with ZooBank? No
Are the DNA sequences available in GenBank? No
Is the data available for downloading? No*
Has the distributional data been deposited in GBIF? No

I don’t wish to take away from what has clearly been a lot of work, but surely we need to think about the best way to make all this hard work as widely accessible as possible? A PDF with wonderful pictures of dragonflies and low resolution maps does not represent the best that modern taxonomic publishing can offer.

Regards

Rod

* The articles says "A list of collection codes and corresponding BOLD numbers can be down- loaded from the journal website (http://www.odonatologica.com)” This is not a link to the data, which I can’t see anywhere on the web site.

---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email:  Roderic.Page at glasgow.ac.uk<mailto:Roderic.Page at glasgow.ac.uk>
Tel:  +44 141 330 4778
Skype:  rdmpage
Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/rdmpage
LinkedIn:  http://uk.linkedin.com/in/rdmpage
Twitter:  http://twitter.com/rdmpage
Blog:  http://iphylo.blogspot.com
ORCID:  http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7101-9767
Citations:  http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=4Z5WABAAAAAJ
ResearchGate https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Roderic_Page


On 11 Dec 2015, at 11:14, Ellinor Michel <e.michel at nhm.ac.uk<mailto:e.michel at nhm.ac.uk>> wrote:

[posted on behalf of the primary author, Klaas-Douwe 'KD' B. Dijkstra]

'Dear colleagues,

All awareness, conservation and research of nature starts with the question: which species is that? Names introduce species to humanity. It’s a biologist’s greatest importance today, but just now nature is under historic pressure, such research is getting less support.

We aim to expose this paradox by naming 60 new dragonflies from Africa, increasing the number known by almost 10% at once. All are colourful and conspicuous, representing some of the most sensitive and beautiful of all biodiversity: freshwater, Earth’s most dense and threatened species richness — Africa, the continent that will change most in the 21st century — and dragonflies, the insects that may be among the best gauges of global change.

We hope this message will be heard widely, so please share this as you wish, e.g. on blogs and to the local media, particularly in Africa itself.

Press release: https://goo.gl/KGMsyC
Info and images: https://goo.gl/vRoJSL
Full publication: www.osmylus.com/index.php/downloads<http://www.osmylus.com/index.php/downloads><http://www.osmylus.com/index.php/downloads>
Watch discovery of new species in DR Congo: youtu.be/Arr2k7dwzSU<http://youtu.be/Arr2k7dwzSU><http://youtu.be/Arr2k7dwzSU>

Best wishes, also on behalf of my co-authors Jens and Nico, who have both made their exceptional contributions in their free time!

Klaas-Douwe 'KD' B. Dijkstra
Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, The Netherlands
Conservation Ecology and Entomology, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
science.naturalis.nl/dijkstra<http://science.naturalis.nl/dijkstra><http://science.naturalis.nl/dijkstra>

'
_______________________________________________
Taxacom Mailing List
Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu<mailto:Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
The Taxacom Archive back to 1992 may be searched at: http://taxacom.markmail.org

Celebrating 28 years of Taxacom in 2015.