MarBEF publishing revisited

Networking and integration served within a partnership approach and covered with a delicious sauce of free and open access to data and information is MarBEF’s main dish, and it is this recipe that has helped MarBEF to successfully bring marine biodiversity research to a European level. Numerous meetings, workshops, training courses and Responsive Mode Projects (RMPs) have brought together many scientists. This integration has created endless new possibilities for new initiatives – the MarBEF Publication Series and the MarBEF Open Archive, to mention just two. So, is this having any effect on the way we publish as a network today

Publish wisely or perish? an open archive for MarBEF

While scientists are publishing around two million papers annually (Odlyzko, 1998), it is surprising to notice that this growing resource of information is seldom easily accessible, even to those scientists. Basically, it is the community at large that funds almost all research, so all information resulting from this research should in principle be publicly available. However, in reality, too many barriers (mostly installed by the publisher) are blocking free and open access to scientific information

Maintaining native levels of shallow-water holothurian biodiversity in the western Indian Ocean (poster)

In East Africa, holothurian populations are currently reaching depletion due to extensive harvesting for the bêche-de-mer industry in the Far East. However, to date, conservation and management of this fauna in an ecosystem approach is currently hardly feasible, for the simple reason that we still fail to name the different players in the game, let alone to monitor the interactions between these or yet other players in the ecosystem.We strongly believe that taxonomic accuracy sets the key to understanding both history and future of holothurian biodiversity, and that only such an approach will result in unambiguous hypotheses of species richness in the different parts of the western Indian Ocean. Our attempts reveal that several flaws in the taxonomy persistently obstructed a clear understanding of holothurian biodiversity. The present study compares the poorly investigated East African situation to the better studied South East African one and stresses that an ecosystem approach is difficult to attain before the taxonomy has reached sufficient stability

Taxonomic editors plan a World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS)

An authoritative register of all marine species is urgently required to facilitate biological data exchange and management, integration of biological with other ocean data, and to allow taxonomists to focus on describing new species instead of overlooking recently described species and correcting past nomenclatural confusion (Costello et al., 2006). Its production has added benefits in fostering collaboration between experts at a global scale. Easy access to encourages submissions of overlooked species to the list. In turn, this stimulates biogeographic and evolutionary research