Hi Ross,
your email has been burning in my inbox for a while now, and just because you haven't had any replies yet doesn't mean nobody's listening :)
What's worse is. I get the feeling (some) people just don't care.
They can seem oblivious to the benefits. Ignorant to the lost re-purposing potential.
The first people to adopt standards aren't going to reap the rewards (that much). It'd be good for everyone if everyone else did it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's good for one person to start doing it (I guess we all know the equivalents of this in game theory and group selection).
A tiny few evolution and ecology journals have recently changed editorial policy for the better -> So what? These journals are a just a drop in the ocean of what's out there that publish phylogenetic analyses, particularly palaeo-phylo analyses.
There is actually more of a push for data archiving (and, consequently, data standards?) then you make it out to be.
How many systematic palaeontologists know or care about ontologies and/or XML-schema?
Not many, but that's probably the fault of the standards and informatics people who don't provide the right tools (I guess that's us?)
It's all fine and well creating wonderfully clever linked architectures for data, but if the primary data-producers don't know about them, nor want the additional 'hassle' (no matter how little hassle it is), these brilliant data-networks may remain relatively empty.
Community-change is needed, first-and-foremost I argue. The question I ask is how?
Presumably by providing the community with better tools and more outreach.
PS I find it gratingly ironic that Palaeontologists have an extremely faithfully updated public database for taxonomic and stratigraphic occurrence records: http://paleodb.org/ Why are MorphoBank and/or TreeBASE not as popular?
Mmmm. What do you think?
Rutger
p.s. great that you're so passionate about this. Maybe you should get involved?