Slides from talk for ICZN/SHNH symposium in honour of Charles Sherbon: "Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st Century and Beyond"

1. Anchoring Biodiversity Information:
From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond
Towards an Open Taxonomy
@rdmpage
http://iphylo.blogspot.com

4. 4 million articles

6. 35 years in jail
$US 1M fine

7. Greg Maxwell

8. “I am writing to share exciting news:
today, we are making journal content on
JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United
States and prior to 1870 elsewhere, freely
available to the public for reading and
downloading.”

9. Information wants to be free
Information wants to be expensive

10. http://www.organismnames.com

11. www.theplantlist.org

12. You may not alter, transform, or
build upon this work

13. http://iphylo.org/~rpage/theplantlist

14. The top-ten new species described in 2010 and the failure of
taxonomy to embrace Open Access publication
http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2011/05/top-ten-new-species-described-in-2010.html

15. Taxonomy is not open

16. Taxonomy is not (really) digital

18. Taxonomic databases are
digitised 5 × 3 index cards

19. Catalogue of Life

20. Endacustapindana

23. What would Google do?

24. What would Charles Sherborn do if
he was 19 and worked at Google?

26. name
name

27. What is a taxonomic name?

28. Let’s ask a taxonomist…

29. species concept
plenary
valid
powers
homonyms basionym
lexical variant
typification nomennudum
code publication date
compliant taxonomic
trinomial concepts

30. …on second thoughts, let’s not.

31. name

33. Taxonomy is not linked

34. Literature online
Commercial
publishers
Digital archives
Museums,
universities,
and scientific
societies

35. http://iphyo.org/~rpage/afd

36. Publication links
• 25,554 publications
• 32% have digital identifier (BHL, DOI, URL)
• 20% in BioStor
• 10% have DOIs

38. http://iphylo.org/~rpage/zoobank

41. Geothelphusamarmorata

42. http://www.organismnames.com

43. http://www.organismnames.com

44. ION LSID XML

45. http://iphylo.org/~rpage/itaxon

47. http://iphylo.org/~rpage/itaxon

48. 14% of names linked to a
bibliographic identifier
DOI 105,947
BioStor 40,300
Handle 19,325
URL 24,680
JSTOR 19,032
PDF 32,069
CiNii 5,457
Any identifier 214,049
Names 1,491,137

49. I want a taxonomy that is
• Open
• Digital
• Linked

50. Show me the name

51. Linking to data

52. Publishing platform

53. The spider family Selenopidae
(Arachnida, Araneae) in Australasia
and the Oriental Region

55. All links go elsewhere

56. http://iphylo.org/~rpage/itaxon

57. All links are internal

58. Taxonomic database becomes a
platform for taxonomic publishing