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