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Thankyour for your recent clear-thinking and incisive paper in Cladistics on the value and role of taxonomy. Among the many things that you cover are the impediments of accessibility to taxonomists an users.

As you well know, taxonomy is extraordinary among the scientific disciplines in the relevance and use of historical literature. Not only is our field intrinsically concerned with taxon histories but we have a stronger sense and reverence for past work. Darwin’s barnacle monographs are immediately relevant to the modern Cirripede systematist. For taxonomists, easy access to the historical literature is essential. I’ve found resources such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library and Google Books to be extraordinarily useful in allowing me to access critical older monographs that previously I could access only through interlibrary loans or occasional visits to libraries elsewhere.

One impediment that I do not think you grapple with is that of access to recent work. Zootaxa has had stellar success as the central journal of taxonomic description – for good reason. Subscription services such as BioOne allow unprecedented access to a whole range of museum journals that previously had a narrow distribution. Much of the remainder is in subscription based journals. The cost of these subscriptions is substantial and institutional libraries baulk at the cost versus that of more general subscription services (until recently I was at University of the Free State, where we had a community of taxonomists but lacked subscriptions to Zootaxa and BioOne – the cost of a complete Zootaxa subscription was considerably higher than that of subscription services with numerous high-use journals). I work mainly on frogs but teach and am generally interested in taxonomy and read papers across the taxonomic gamut. The limited subscription model of Zootaxa doesn’t really allow for this. Open access would increase citation rates for taxonomic works, increase the value to end users, through familiarity and use, and increase the ease of doing taxonomy. There must be some viable Open Access model that solves the problem of publication costs and the maintenance of quality without introducing additional impediments such as page charges (perhaps advertising is the answer).

It’s an obvious and ongoing argument but still unresolved (despite the emergence of open access journals such as EJT, as yet they don’t really compare with Zootaxa for breadth and readership). I found this excellent blog on the point…http://www.zelnio.org/2010/02/19/open-access-taxonomy-and-plos/