Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Journal of Hymenoptera Research Open Access and taxpub based

On February 8, Pensoft published the first gold Open Access and NLM Taxpub based issue of the Journal of Hymenoptera Research. It is one of the first journals Pensoft publishes for a scientific society besides its own inhouse journals such as Zookeys. The implication are beyond changing from a traditional pdf based to a semantically enhanced taxpub NLM DTD based journal allowing immediate distribution of its content to a set of external aggregators such as Plazi, Encylopedia of Life, Wikispecied or the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, and not least PubMedCentral for archival, one of the big issues in taxonomic literature. The big question will be, how the journal will break even, will it attract more readers, and whether the members of the society will continue their annual subscription now that one of the returns is open and freely available.

I am very glad that this development keeps its momentum. The Hymenoptera taxonomist's community has and is developing very advanced tools that, if brought together, will make the field of Hymenoptera taxonomy very attractive. Norm Johnson's Hymenoptera Name Server and John Noyes Chalcidoid Database are just two very large databases with well over 100,000 names and related bibliographic records included. Antbase was spearheading the development of online domain specific digital libraries, antweb the development of standardized digital imagery, the Hymenoptera Anatomy Ontology and not least advanced systems like Norm Johnson's that allow XML publishing straight out of the databases (see an example here).

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