[Taxacom] Paywall our taxonomic tidbit

Sun Jan 17 18:43:02 CST 2016

In my field (chewing lice) the solution is that virtually everything gets
uploaded to a scratchpad, where it can be accessed by anyone who wants. I
recently heard the manager of our scratchpad say that about a third of all
published papers on lice ever were on there, with the majority of the
missing papers being on treatment and other studies of human or livestock
lice. The scratchpad is of course somewhat limited to what someone submits,
but virtually all taxonomic papers ever published on lice are available
from there. Perhaps in some minor way connected to this, there seem to be
many more authors from non-western countries publishing studies on lice in
the last decade or so.

I haven't had much reason to look at other scratchpads, but I had a
colleague who was working on a similar thing for fungus gnats and making
online distribution maps and stuff for that group in the scratchpad. I am a
member of some facebook groups that share share all new publications on
Mesozoic and Paleozoic papers (taxonomical and otherwise) in a similar
manner, trying to build up extensive databases.

One drawback (except for papers that are not in the database) I have come
across is that people sometimes submit final drafts to the database, so the
page numbers and so on are not always in the version in the scratchpad.
This is a very minor drawback, though, as this data can typically be
obtained for free from the publisher's homepage.

Cheers,
Leo

On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 5:28 PM, Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>
wrote:

> Yes, I suffer from paywalls too. But what is the alternative? Solving one
> problem tends to create other problems. Open access fees might have the
> effect of preventing authors without sufficient funding from being able to
> afford to publish. It might also divert a significant proportion of
> research funding (without an increase in that funding) to publisher's
> profits, resulting in less funding for research. If there is an increase in
> funding to compensate, then it comes out of the public purse. It seems to
> be being sold as a for the public good, but the public at large gets
> nothing out of it, so let's all stop pretending that they do! Paying for
> "free" access is a complex thing. It can work. I pay up front for a month
> of unlimited public transport because it works for me since I am an
> unusually heavy user of public transport and the price of cash fares has
> really been cranked up. But, for many other people, it is not economical to
> buy monthly passes. It all depends on the details. I'm pretty sure though
> that the general public aren't heavy users of specialised taxonomic
> literature! At any rate, there is no guarantee that research funding will
> increase to compensate for open access fees. Besides, there is still the
> issue of retrospective open access. Chances are that we may end up in a
> situation of having to pay BOTH subscriptions (for already published stuff)
> AND open access fees (for new stuff). Neither are guaranteed to be cheap,
> particularly for high impact journals.
>
> Stephen
>
> --------------------------------------------
> On Mon, 18/1/16, Fred Schueler <bckcdb at istar.ca> wrote:
>
>  Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Paywall our taxonomic tidbit
>  To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
>  Received: Monday, 18 January, 2016, 1:08 PM
>
>  On 1/17/2016 5:41 PM,
>  Stephen Thorpe wrote:
>  > The current
>  system (reader pays for what they want to read) has proved
>  workable, sustainable and accessible to date!
>
>  * except that those of us
>  without institutional connections can't afford
>  to read anything more than the abstract of
>  commercially "published" work
>  unless we badger the authors to send out
>  personal copies. This means
>  that
>  "commercially published" and "samizdat"
>  are synonymous, except for
>  the public
>  display of the abstract.
>
>  fred.
>  ------------------------------------------------------------
>             Frederick W. Schueler
>  & Aleta Karstad
>  Daily Paintings - http://karstaddailypaintings.blogspot.com/
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>       RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario,
>  Canada K0G 1T0
>      on the Smiths Falls
>  Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W
>
>     (613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca> http://pinicola.ca/
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