antbase down: up again

Antbase is up again. All the citations are now linked again to the original descriptions, or all the citations given to the group. This new system allows us to provide access to all the descriptions (via antbase), or subsequent citations (via HOL, linked from the bottom of the antbase search return page) irrespective whether the publication is open access, we have a copyright waver or they are copyrighted.

What we have not resolved yet is access to all the publications. We are few steps away from a solution, but need to implement it. The solution will not include a per se open access but via a login. What the condidtion for a login will be is still under discussion. Certainly, those who are supporting antbase will get it.

antbase down: (almost) alive again

After far too long, antbase.org is up again. It is not the same as before, because we changed our policy. We cannot risk again to be shut down because we have copyrighted material online. For our convenience we provide at the beginning none or only to those publications access that are older than 1926, the cut of day for copyrighted material, and gradually will add more to it. This is not the solution that we envision, but that’s reality we life in, and as long as we publish in non-Open Access journals we are our own culprit.

However, being now based in Switzerland, we have the legal environment to provide access to all the descriptions, irrespective of their date of publication (for details see Agosti & Egloff). We thus will make it to our goal to provide as in the past at least access to all the descriptions.

For those offered support during the last month, we would like to suggest to monitor antbase and let us know, whether we are missing out on a description and the respective original treatment. This will help us to stay up to date with less effort from our side. Hopefully at some point, the goal of a synchronization of the our database (the Hymenoptera Name Server) and antcat will work out, and make all of use more efficient and using all our individual strengths.

If you are even more devoted to provide access, you can help us to mark up the publications on Plazi and make it accessible much more widely, such as in the Encyclopedia of life or antweb.org.

For now, Norm and Joe are working at the HNS side to insert all the links that have been taken down. This should be done in the next couple of days so that antbase will be fully operational as described above.

OA ant publications: Neotropical Ants issue

Hindawi published in the revitalized Psyche (70 articles published only this year) a special edition Advances in Neotropical Myrmecology, including the description of some very unusual ants like the second species of Tatuidris.

From a cataloguing point of view and thus also from a nomenclatorial point, I do not find an indication that the journal is not just an e-only-journal but has the still necessary printed version. Also it is a bit awkward that there is no proper volume number, as Psyche had before, but just the year.

Despite all of this, I am always delighted to see publications from the sprawling Neotropical ant community, and that ants are used in environmental and especially monitoring studies.

antbase down

Antbase is still down, even 27 days after it has been shut down - the story about that will be written up with due distance to this event.

This morning I met my colleagues Helen and Sakine to discuss the future development of the Iran Ant Fauna Project. In this situation, I am the user of antbase and thus realize what it means – if I would not know already – to be cut off from the literature supply.

One of the first thoughts was to think about how we can avoid this in future, and this I am sure will not happen again. The second thought was about the ephemeral nature of the Internet. Somebody outside a project decides to shut down a service and off is such a rather expensive resource. This again is something to keep in mind, but not very helpful right now. The third thought was, I can’t believe it, and there must be ways around.

And there are.

Remember, one important element of antbase was that you can get from a reference directly to the respective page or publication. And this service is now cut, because the link exists, but it does not resolve. The way around is to do the following that works to publications at around 2009.
1. Go to archive.org’s WayBackMachine and search for antbase.org
2. Click the latest snapshot of antbase and enter the search term you want. You can get all the publications out this way.
3. Copy the title of the publication you want into the search field on the upper right corner of archive.org and you will get the respective publication from the ant collection Brian and I once helped the Internet Archive to establish.

We are now close to have the entire data moved to a new site and will be able to relaunch antbase within the next days.

General issues are dealt with here.

Specimen collection

Today I got the most extraordinary ant collection for identification ever. I wonder, what words can mean, and how loosely they can be interpreted. I met this student from Mashad at IRIPP to discuss his project to write a book about the ants of Iran. Among others we discussed how he has to label and mount the ants. For that I showed him some examples, and explained it again at the recent first meeting of Iranian myrmecologists and this is the result. Yes, I do not speak Farsi, and I eat up ends of my words, but even pictures (the slides with mounted specimens) don't do the job. A real challenge for intercultural communication.
Even tough I would have preferred a detailed list of specimen information, his list at least includes geo-coordinates (I assume from a GPS in the field) which allows to derive all the rest of the information.
The good thing - though demanding some time - is that there is a wet collection as well.