Surfacing the deep data of taxonomy

My paper "Surfacing the deep data of taxonomy" (based on a presentation I gave in 2011) has appeared in print as part to a special issue of Zookeys:

Page, R. (2016, January 7). Surfacing the deep data of taxonomy. ZooKeys. Pensoft Publishers. http://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.550.9293

The manuscript was written shortly after the talk, but as is the nature of edited volumes it's taken a while to appear.

My tweet about the paper sparked some interesting comments from David Shorthouse.

@KlausRiede @rdmpage Revitalize? Yes. Through less focus on taxa and more on uniquely identified, shared data objects and altmetrics.

— David Shorthouse (@dpsSpiders) January 8, 2016

This is an appealing vision, because it seems unlikely that having multiple, small communities clustered around taxa will ever have the impact that taxonomists might like to have. Perhaps if we switch to focussing on objects (sequences, specimens, papers), notions of identity (e.g., DOIs, ORCID), and alternative measures of impact we can increase the visibility and perceived importance of the field. In this context, the recent paper "Wikiometrics: A Wikipedia Based Ranking System" http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.01058 looks interesting. A big consideration will be how connected is the network connecting taxonomists, papers, sequences, specimens, and names. If it's anything like the network of readers in Mendeley then we may face some challenges in community building around such a network.

BioNames and altmetrics

One consequence of having a database of literature with external identifiers such as DOIs is that we can plug into a bunch of external services to get additional information about a reference. For example, altmetric can take a DOI and display some article level metrics. As an experiment I've added code for altmetric badges to the web page in BioNames that displays publications. For example, here is the ZooKeys paper "An extraordinary new family of spiders from caves in the Pacific Northwest (Araneae, Trogloraptoridae, new family)" in BioNames:



The "About" tab displays the altmetric badge with a bunch of metrics of engagement with this paper. If you click on the badge you get more details about what people have been saying about this paper.

It would be great to explore this across the complete set of taxonomic papers so that we could get a sense the degree of engagement people have with the latest taxonomic literature.