[Taxacom] Dark Research: a comparison of content discoverability between PLOS ONE and Zootaxa

[rcpm20 at bath.ac.uk]

Quoting Donat Agosti <agosti at amnh.org>:

> Dear Ross
> Thanks for this study. Did you have a chance to compare your  
> findings with content in the Biodiversity Data Journal  
> (http://bdj.pensoft.net/ ) or its technical precursor, Zookeys  
> (http://www.pensoft.net/journals/zookeys ) both based on Taxpub  
> JATS, that is a semantically enhanced version of JATS a flovor of it  
> is also used in PLoS?
> Cheers
> Donat


Not yet, but as I have indicated in the Future Work section - this  
would be the obvious thing to do: test a wider variety of journals and  
publishers who publish articles in the realm of taxonomy, systematics  
& phylogenetics.

This initial paper is just to establish that there is/can be a  
substantial difference in discoverability of content between journals.  
So the next big task is to assemble a larger/comprehensive list of  
journals & analyse a cross-section of content across them. A lot of  
work, but I think it needs to be done to clearly demonstrate the  
otherwise-hidden value of high-quality electronic publishing (in that  
it can make content much more discoverable). It helps too that UK  
copyright law has changed recently to safely enable this kind of text  
& data mining of subscription access research, without the permission  
of the publisher:  
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/06/04/the-right-to-read-is-the-right-to-mine-tdm/

Best,

Ross