[Taxacom] taxonomic names databases

[Frank T. Krell]

"And tracking all the recent primary literature is impossible for most people because a proportion of it is behind a pay-wall."

as they have always been, and it has never been a problem because we have wonderful institutions helping us around that, and always have: they are called libraries. I got interlibrary loans from Mauritius, Australia, Swaziland, Japan, etc. etc.
And nowadays we have all those social media sites where authors post their papers. If subscription journals were a problem, then the whole scientific enterprise wouldn't work. Automatic aggregating might be difficult with paywalls, but I am not too impressed with automatic aggregates anyway. Quality always requires human interference, and use of libraries fits in naturally. We always want to have everything ready at hand, without waiting two days for an interlibrary loan, and the poor authors should pay for that. Many authors can't. Most open access journals are behind a pay wall for authors.

And yes, I do prefer open access and publish my institute's journals that way (and without page charges to avoid any sort of paywall, but then we do not make money, we spend).


Dr Frank T. Krell
Editor-in-Chief, DMNS Annals and DMNS Reports
http://www.dmns.org/science/museum-publications/

Senior Curator of Entomology 
Department of Zoology 
Denver Museum of Nature & Science 
2001 Colorado Boulevard 
Denver, CO 80205-5798 USA 
Frank.Krell at dmns.org 
Phone: (+1) (303) 370-8244 
Fax: (+1) (303) 331-6492 
http://www.dmns.org/science/museum-scientists/frank-krell
lab page: http://www.dmns.org/krell-lab