Re: Fwd: What happened to CATE-Araceae site?

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All the content that you so generously contributed should be there. I just searched your name on the site and there are over 1000 entries!  The site has been very quiet for the last few years. Its future currently depends on the goodwill of the Natural History Museum of London, who also serve hundreds of other taxonomic websites like CATE on their Scratchpads project, run by Dr Vince Smith (http://scratchpads.eu/). CATE has from the beginning, back in about 2004, been a collaboration between Kew and the NHM London. We are hopeful that we now have a few trouble-free years ahead of us. I think the concept of a taxonomic website run by a global community of taxonomists is still a bit of a novelty. In the end, only institutions can guarantee them as permanent fixtures, but the whole point of websites like CATE is that they are open to all bona fide researchers and I think that this can be a major security problem for individual institutions. The basic concept of the original CATE team was that in the future, taxonomic revisions of organisms will be websites rather than paper-published, and they would usually need to be the work of international teams rather than just one or two individuals, in order to reach and maintain high quality.  This is quite an idealistic view, and there is still some way to go before this becomes the default way of doing taxonomy. However, there are indications that things are moving a bit. See the recent paper here https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000736

All the best

Simon