Palaeontologia Electronica needs your help!
Article number: 20.2.2E
https://doi.org/10.26879/172E
Copyright Coquina Press, June 2017
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ABSTRACT
We announce two changes to the operation of Palaeontologia Electronica (PE). First, we are establishing a Patron Program to raise funds to supply PE articles with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). This will permit improved accessibility to PE articles without imposing charges on authors or readers. Second, all PE articles whose copyright is assigned to the Paleontological Society will be open access under the (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
Julien Louys. School of Culture, History, and Languages, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia julien.louys@anu.edu.au
Andrew Bush. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Center for Integrative Geosciences, University of Connecticut, 75 N. Eagleville Rd, Storrs, Connecticut 06269-3043 USA andrew.bush@uconn.edu
Jennifer Pattison Rumford. Palaeontologia Electronica, Texas USA jennifer.rumford@gmail.com
Keywords: electronic publishing, palaeontology, DOI, journal
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
EDITORIAL
Palaeontologia Electronica (PE) is currently generously supported by palaeontological societies, providing us with the funds necessary to publish content that is free to both readers and authors. This was one of PE’s founding principles, and one that has continued for 20 years. A prominent feature of electronic publishing today, which was not there when PE began, is the need for persistent interoperable identifiers for digital objects available through the Internet. Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are one such identifier, first launched in 2000 (www.doi.org). Since then, DOIs have become widely accepted for publication of academic media, in particular scholarly papers.
In order for PE to adopt the DOI system, we require additional funding to manage and curate these DOIs, beyond that currently afforded by our sponsoring societies. The DOI system will provide each PE article with a form of persistent identification. It will also be associated with the article metadata, providing users with relevant pieces of information about the article and its relationships. The DOI for an article remains fixed over the lifetime of the document, whereas its location and other metadata may change. Referring to an online document by its DOI provides a more stable link than simply using its URL, because if the URL changes, we only need to update the metadata for the DOI to link to the new URL.
In order to adopt and pay for this system, PE is currently setting up a Patron Program. We are introducing a tiered system, with Gold Patrons committing to donating $100 a year to Coquina Press, PE’s publisher, for five years, upon which their patronage can be renewed for a further five years. Silver Patrons commit to donating $50 a year, and Bronze Patrons commit to $20 a year, each for five years. One-time contributions are also gratefully received. Because Coquina Press is a 501(c)(3) California non-profit organization, this donation may be tax deductible, depending on the country in which a tax return is filed. In return for support, Patron names will be listed in a prominent position on PE’s website below the banners for our existing sponsoring societies. Patrons will also be eligible to receive a copy of our annual report upon request.
PE UPDATE: See this page to sign up to support our Patronage Program.
Paleontological Society moves copyright to Creative Commons
Finally, in a welcome move, we are delighted to announce that articles published with PE and whose copyright has been assigned to the Paleontological Society will henceforth be open access articles distributed under the terms of Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. This license permits users to copy and redistribute the article in any medium or format provided it is not used for commercial purposes and the original author and source are credited, with indications if any changes are made (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). This will also apply retrospectively to all articles assigned to the Paleontology Society. These join articles with copyright assigned to the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, which are published under CC BY 4.0.
