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.
The new look Biodiversity Heritage Library includes articles extracted from BioStor, which is a step forwards in making the "legacy" biodiversity literature more accessible. But we still have some way to go. In particular the articles lack the obvious decoration of a modern article, the DOI.
Quick note that as much as I like that the Biodiversity Heritage Library is using DOIs, they are generating them for publications that already have them (or are acquiring them from other sources). For example, here are the two DOIs for the same article (formatted using the DOI Citation Formatter), one from BHL and one from the Smithsonian: The BHL DOI resolves to a page in BHL, the other DOI resolves to the a page in the Smithsonian Digital
Quick thoughts on the recent announcement by figshare and F1000 about the new journals being launched on the F1000 Research site. The articles being published have data sets embedded as figshare widgets in the body of the text, instead of being, say, a static table. For example, the article: has a widget that looks like this: You can interact with this widget to view the data.
Quick note that Morgan Jackson (@BioInFocus) has written nice blog post Citations, Social Media & Science inspired by the fact that the following paper: Kwong, S., Srivathsan, A., & Meier, R. (2012). An update on DNA barcoding: low species coverage and numerous unidentified sequences. Cladistics, no–no. doi:10.1111/j.1096-0031.2012.00408.x cites my "Dark taxa" in the body of the text but not in the list of literature cited.
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.
Given various discussions about identifiers, dark taxa, and DNA barcoding that have been swirling around the last few weeks, there's one notion that is starting to bug me more and more.
Following on from my earlier post Linking taxonomic names to literature: beyond digitised 5×3 index cards I've been slowly updating my latest toy: http://iphylo.org/~rpage/itaxon This site displays a database mapping over 200,000 animal names to the primary literature, using a mix of identifiers (DOIs, Handles, PubMed, URLs) as well as links to freely available PDFs where they are available.
Browsing EOL I stumbled upon the recently described fish Protoanguilla palau , shown below in an image by rairaiken2011: Two things struck me, the first is that the EOL page for this fish gives absolutely no clue as to where you would to find out more about this fish (apart from an unclickable link to the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoanguilla - seriously, a link that isn't clickable?), despite the fact this fish