To all those interested in archiving, sharing, re-use, etc of trees (w data & metadata)--

At the TDWG meeting in Woods Hole 2 months ago, the phylogenetic standards interest group spawned a sub-group (Dan Rosauer, Torsten Eriksson, Jamie Whitacre, Elena Herzog and myself) committed to a project to assess current best practices for publishing a phylogenetic tree electronically. This project is very timely as several major evolution journals have now announced that in January 2011 they will require archiving of data including phylogenetic trees.

Since then, we've done a considerable amount of work that is reflected in drafts of an online report, and of a user survey. Our intention is to release a preliminary report, send out the survey to get systematic feedback from a broad community of tree-makers and tree-users, then write a more complete report for publication. The draft report and survey are available here:

http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/Phylogenetics/LinkingTrees2010 https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dHhZa0xMQTJuR0ZCZWxoV2JSTG1...

At present, it does not seem that this will be done in time to release the report in 2010. However, delaying until January will give us time to improve the report.

Please let me know if you have suggestions about how to improve the report, or if you would like to contribute more directly (i.e., by joining the project and doing some research and writing).

By way of fair warning, currently this is a "TDWG phylogenetic standards interest group" project, but if there is not enough energy in our interest group to finish this in a timely manner-- and so far there isn't-- I'm inclined to peddle this project more widely to get collaborators. Thanks for your time,

Arlin ------- Arlin Stoltzfus (arlin@umd.edu) Fellow, IBBR; Adj. Assoc. Prof., UMCP; Research Biologist, NIST IBBR, 9600 Gudelsky Drive, Rockville, MD tel: 240 314 6208; web: www.molevol.org