I only just now read Bryan Heidorn's excellent post on this topic (below). One thing I would add is that the nature of the internet and electronic information allow us opportunities to ensure permanence and access that were either impossible, or prohibitively expensive even a decade ago. Imagine, for example, an internet protocol that allowed both institutions and individuals to "plug in" and expose their digitial catalogs of stored electronic publications (and other resources) such that the whereabouts of literally thousands of copies of every electronic publication could be known to anyone. The system I envision is somewhat of a cross between existing protocols for interlibrary loan, and the original Napster. Certainly all sorts of copyright issues need to be sorted out, but these are short-term problems (less than a century), compared to the long-term (multi-millenia?) issue of information persistence. The point is, knowing the whereabaouts of extant copies of digital documents, coupled with the amazing ease and low cost of duplication and global dissemination (not to mention plummeting costs of electronic storage media), would virtually guarantee the long-term persistence of digital information.
Any system is, of course, vulnerable to the collapse (or major perturbation) of human civilization. And the electronic translator problem I alluded to in an earlier post cannot be ignored. But to pretend that the potential doesn't exist or shouldn't be actively pursued is pure folly, in my opinion.
Aloha, Rich
Richard L. Pyle, PhD Database Coordinator for Natural Sciences and Associate Zoologist in Ichthyology Department of Natural Sciences, Bishop Museum 1525 Bernice St., Honolulu, HI 96817 Ph: (808)848-4115, Fax: (808)847-8252 email: deepreef@bishopmuseum.org http://hbs.bishopmuseum.org/staff/pylerichard.html
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-guid-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:tdwg-guid-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of P. Bryan Heidorn Sent: Friday, November 24, 2006 8:22 AM To: tdwg-guid@mailman.nhm.ku.edu; Taxacom Subject: Re: [Tdwg-guid] Demise of Phyloinformatics journal
The problem and solution has less to do with the Internet and more to do with institutional longevity. The permanence of paper has less to do with acid free paper and more to do with the relative permanence of the institutions that house them. Most paper documents over a hundred years old have been lost forever because there were no permanent institutions to hold them until the advent of public and academic libraries. Papers in individual scientists collections are discarded when they die. War and economic upheavals left paper in rain and fire. It is foolhardy to assume that what is on paper is safe.
We know that dissemination of information in electronic form is must more economical than paper dissemination. The issue is development of proper institutions with adequate stable funding to develop and maintain copies into "perpetuity". Commercial publishers, are clearly not the answer for preservation. Corporations and publishers go out of business all the time. It is only because libraries kept paper copies that we still have a record.
Digital preservation and access problems exist for all sciences and government documents so there is no need to the biodiversity community to go it alone on this. We are just in the beginning of the digital publishing history and have not yet established adequate preservation mechanisms within libraries to handle data curation, preservation and access in all the situations where it is necessary. There are projects underway world wide to address this issue. In the United States the Library of Congress The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program http:// www.digitalpreservation.gov/ is one example. The U.S. Government agency the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) http:// www.imls.gov/ began grant programs to train librarians and museum curators in digital librarianship and most recently in digital data curation http://www.imls.gov/applicants/grants/ 21centuryLibrarian.shtm is addressing the education issues. The University of North Carolina http://www.ils.unc.edu/digccurr2007/ papers.html and the University of Illinois http://sci.lis.uiuc.edu/ DCEP/ have begun working on best practices and education. This week say the successful Data Curation Conference (DCC) in Glasgow, Scotland http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2006/. DCC will be running "Long-term Curation and Preservation of Journals" 31 January 2007. (as an aside, at DCC conference I saw results of a survey in "Attitudes and aspirations in a diverse world: the Project StORe perspective on scientific repositories" Graham Pryor, University of Edinburgh http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2006/ programme/presentations/g-pryor.ppt that more scientists trusted publishers to save their digital documents than their home institutions and libraries! It is clear that scientists are generally not trained in economics and that the information technology management of many institutions must be abysmal!
We need something like to 5 institution rule for distribution to apply for digital documents. Digital documents need to be replicated as well for both access and preservation. Institutions like the Internet Archive help with some of the current problems. Institutional Repositories (IR) are another. Many universities and libraries world wide are beginning these. It is authors' responsibility to deposit their publications in these institutions and to support their creation. JSTOR and other institutions also exist. They all have their weaknesses and additional research, development and funding is needed to adequately address the issues. Also, all journals need to be managed using good data curation principles but al too often the publishers in spite of best intentions are not educated in such issues.
Digital publishing of taxonomic literature are not the full answer for current poor dissemination of taxonomic literature. The deposit of a published name in five institutions is a preservation rule, not a dissemination rule. We hurt science and human health is we do not at the same time address the information access issue. We need to aspire to better dissemination and preservation. Electronic publishing will help but only if appropriate institutions in place.
On the smaller issue, DOIs for publications, electronic or paper is a no-brainer. URLs were never designed to be permanent. URLs were designed to be reused and be flexible. With DOIs we can place the same paper in multiple digital or physical locations and reliably find copies.
Bryan Heidorn
P. Bryan Heidorn Graduate School of Library and Information Science pheidorn@uiuc.edu University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign MC-493 (V)217/ 244-7792 501 East Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820-6212 (F)217/ 244-3302 https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/pheidorn/www
On Nov 24, 2006, at 9:54 AM, Renato De Giovanni wrote:
Rod,
Thanks for sharing with us the information. I already imagined that things like that could happen, but it's always better to
argue having
real examples.
Anyway, just in case someone reading the story decides to
blame URLs,
I just wanted to say that in my opinion the main issue here is not the technology or the GUID format being used. It's the
business model
and the management strategy.
I can easily imagine similar things happening to DOIs,
LSIDs or other
kinds of issued GUIDs if the institution(s) behind them simply disappear.
Best Regards,
Renato
IT Researcher CRIA - Reference Center on Environmental Information http://www.cria.org.br/
On 24 Nov 2006 at 13:37, Roderic Page wrote:
The Open Access web-only journal "Phyloinformatics" seems to have disappeared, with the Internet address http:// www.phyloinformatics.org now up for sale. This means the articles have just disappeared!
There weren't many papers published, but some were
interesting and
have been cited in the mainstream literature.
This also illustrates the problems with linking to digital
resources
using URLs, as opposed to identifiers such as DOIs. With
the loss of
the domain name, this journal has effectively died.
A sobering lesson...
Regards
Rod
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