[Taxacom] BioRSS

[John Grehan]

I guess the incentives aren't there because taxonomists and/or
biodiversitist (whatever the word is) who influence funding allocations
have not identified it as a high priority. Perhaps those who influence
funding priorities don't care about the information we have buried in the
literature, especially taxonomic information. Everything is so often
obsessed about the 'new'

Some Chinese journals that have turned up with my group are:
Acta Entomolgica Sinica
Sinozoologia
Zoological Research
Entotaxonomia
Journal of Qinghai University
Entomological Journal of East China (Fuzhou)
Journal of Huazhong Agricultural University (Wuhan)

On Thu, Nov 25, 2021 at 1:33 PM Roderic Page <Roderic.Page at glasgow.ac.uk>
wrote:

> Hi John,
>
> Yes, this is being updated regularly as I mess about with the code, and
> explore adding other sources (such as Chinese language journals that you
> expressed a desire to see).
>
> There isn’t a set time of day I add new content, but I hope to do this on
> a daily basis (yet another thing to automate). I will make the journal list
> available shortly (need to write some code to display it).
>
> The original plan for this app was to use RSS feeds provided by journals
> to get the latest list of articles each journal publishes. While some
> publishers do support RSS many journals don’t, so I have to come up with
> other ways to get this information. RSS was very popular in the heyday of
> blogging and news feed readers but with the demise of Google Reader
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader and related apps RSS has been
> fading away a bit, which is a pity.
>
> Regarding bioinformatics and “big data”, I have my own issues with various
> projects (which I blogged about), but I think in this case the issue is
> that (a) it’s actually quite challenging to build a tool to poll the
> literature for new species - as I’m rapidly discovering - and (b) what are
> the incentives for providing such a service? I tend to think that people
> act rationally with respect to incentives, and so if things that you want
> to see happen aren’t happening then that’s a close that the  incentives
> aren’t there.
>
> Regards,
>
> Rod
>
>
> On 25 Nov 2021, at 18:03, John Grehan via Taxacom <
> taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> wrote:
>
> Rod,
>
> Am I correct that the main page listing is automatically updated? At least
> that is my impression. As I had the tab still up on my Browser today (25th)
> I noticed the most recent listings to be Nov 24. If updating is constant,
> is there a standard time of the day for this? A constant update would
> certainly make for a convenient reference to check each day or whenever,
> even for a limited range of publications, rather than having to constantly
> check individual journals which is too time consuming. And it looks like
> systematic articles turn up which gets me to biogeography which is my main
> interest in being able to easily view new articles as they appear.
>
> As for journal coverage, is it possible to see the full list of journals
> currently scanned by your application? That would make it easy to suggest
> additions. If there is no web link for that, please send the list to me at
> my email address (or to Taxacom directly). Also, remind me of how your
> program works - I presume it relies on journals or books having some kind
> of web posting of their contents so your program can collate that
> information.
>
> While I might whine on a bit about the problem of limited coverage,
> something like this is certainly better than nothing. It is rather
> depressing to think that after some decades of so-called 'bioinformatics',
> 'big data' and all the other rhetorical crap that was floated out there for
> the big money grants etc, that this very basic knowledge base for the study
> of biodiversity appears to have never been addressed. If it were, Rod would
> not have to still be fiddling around trying to come up with a solution
> several decades later. If ever there were a grant worth enterprise (to get
> the funds necessary to locate and incorporate all relevant journals and
> keep the system permanent) this would appear to fit the bill.
>
> John Grehan
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