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.