Quick notes to self following on from a conversation about linking taxonomic names to the literature. There are different sorts of citation: Paper cites another paper Paper cites a dataset Dataset cites a paper Citation type (1) is largely a solved problem (although there are issues of the ownership and use of this data, see e.g. Zootaxa has no impact factor.

On Friday I discovered that BHL has started issuing CrossRef DOIs for articles, starting with the journal Revue Suisse de Zoologie . The metadata for these articles comes from BioStor. After a WTF and WWIC moment, I tweeted about this, and something of a Twitter storm (and email storm) ensued: To be clear, I'm very happy that BHL is finally assigning article-level DOIs, and that it is doing this via CrossRef.

I had a long Twitter conversation with Terry Catapano (@catapanoth) today, and as can happen with a distracted stream of tweets, I think we were a little at cross purposes. This blog post is an attempt to unpack the debate.

This is a quick sketch of a way to combine existing tools to help clean and annotate data in GBIF, particularly (but not exclusively) occurrence data. GitHub The data provider puts a Darwin Core Archive (expanded, not zipped) into a GitHub repository. GBIF forks the repository, cleans the data, and uploads that to GBIF to populate the database behind the portal.

I've been banging on about having citable, persistent identifiers for specimens, so was suitably impressed when Derek Sikes posted a comment on iPhylo that Arctos already does this. For example, here is a DOI for a specimen: http://dx.doi.org/10.7299/X7VQ32SJ. So, we're all done, right? Not quite.

Based on recent discussions my sense is that our community will continue to thrash the issue of identifiers to death, repeating many of the debates that have gone on (and will go on) in other areas. To be trite, it seems to me we have three criteria: cheap , resolvable , and persistent . We get to pick two.