Another incremental step has been achieved for the adoption of the practice of data citation; this week, Nature Biotechnology has included one of our dataset DOIs in their references for the first time.

Today marks the first day of the Chinese Lunar New Year, and as we enter the supposedly auspicious year of the Dragon now is a good opportunity to look towards developments in the nascent field of data publication over the upcoming year. This week marked important announcements of new and improved data publication platforms.

Given various discussions about identifiers, dark taxa, and DNA barcoding that have been swirling around the last few weeks, there's one notion that is starting to bug me more and more.

Following on from my earlier post Linking taxonomic names to literature: beyond digitised 5×3 index cards I've been slowly updating my latest toy: http://iphylo.org/~rpage/itaxon This site displays a database mapping over 200,000 animal names to the primary literature, using a mix of identifiers (DOIs, Handles, PubMed, URLs) as well as links to freely available PDFs where they are available.

Browsing EOL I stumbled upon the recently described fish Protoanguilla palau , shown below in an image by rairaiken2011: Two things struck me, the first is that the EOL page for this fish gives absolutely no clue as to where you would to find out more about this fish (apart from an unclickable link to the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoanguilla - seriously, a link that isn't clickable?), despite the fact this fish

Tomorrow is the Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond meeting. It should be an interesting gathering, albeit overshadowed by the sudden death of Frank Bisby.

This week marks another success for the fledgling practice of data citation, with two datasets from our GigaScience database published in Nature Biotechnology . The genomes sequenced by our colleagues at the BGI for the Cynomolgus and Chinese rhesus macaques were initially released DOIs at our launch in July, and were amongst the first (at the time) unpublished genomes released in this way.

This is a follow up to my previous post TDWG Challenge - what is RDF good for? where I'm being, frankly, a pain in the arse, and asking why we bother with RDF? In many ways I'm not particularly anti-RDF, but it bothers me that there's a big disconnect between the reasons we are going down this route and how we are actually using RDF.

Last month, feeling particularly grumpy, I fired off an email to the TDWG-TAG mailing list with the subject Lobbing grenades: a challenge . Here's the email: In the context of the TDWG meeting (happening as we speak and which I'm following via Twitter, hashtag #tdwg) Joel Sachs asked me whether I had any specific data in mind that could form the basis of a discussion. So, here goes.

DOIs are meant to be the gold standard in bibliographic identifier for article. They are not supposed to break. Yet some publishers seem to struggle to get them to work. In the past I've grumbled about BioOne, Wiley, and others as cuplrits with broken or duplicate or disappearing DOIs. Today's source of frustration is Taylor and Francis Online.