AW: Ah, irony (was: Unknown fruit & other plants...)

[agosti]

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Taxacom Discussion List [mailto:TAXACOM at USOBI.ORG] Im Auftrag von
Doug Yanega
Gesendet: Friday, January 17, 2003 8:00 PM
An: TAXACOM at USOBI.ORG
Betreff: Ah, irony (was: Unknown fruit & other plants...)


"It struck me again with a mixture of pride and sadness that this sort
of thing - our collective ability to recognize the living things on the
planet, combined with our willingness, even *eagerness*, to share that
information - is not only our great strength, but our proverbial
Achilles' Heel. If we were lawyers looking up esoteric legal precedents,
or doctors rendering diagnoses of exotic ailments, we'd be charging
several hundred dollars for the sort of specialized information
retrieval that folks here gave Börge for free. "


If you are a lawyer you would have to pay hundred thousand dollars to
get your expertise to charge later others - however, you got your
expertise because National Science Foundations and others pay hundredS
of thousands dollars for it upfront, and keep paying you to get even
more expertise, essentially all your live long.

The problem is, that this sort of information is still too 'expensive'
for non-specialists to obtain. This is one of the main reasons, why
taxonomy is an endangered species. GBIF and colleagues for example in
GenBank willing to search out and link up our few databases will rather
solve this problem  caused by our strange behaviour to hide information
according to the mistaken proverb "Knowledge is power".

So make rather sure, that the wider scientific community believes that
your opinion is worth the buck, than try to squeeze the last penny out
of the non-existing market.


Donat