iPhylo: Which taxonomic journals should be digitised next?

"One reason I was able to build BioNames is because a significant fraction of the taxonomic literature for animals is now online, either due to the efforts of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, digital archives, commercial publishers, or individual institutions and scientific societies. However there are still big gaps in literature availability. To get a sense of these gaps I've constructed a table listing all the journals in BioNames that have an ISSN, ordered by the number of articles in BioNames (i.e., mostly articles that publish new names). The full table is here, I've reproduced part of it below (limited to those journals with at least 500 articles in BioNames). If you click on the ISSN in the table you can go to the corresponding page in BioNames to get full details of what BioNames currently knows about that journal. The journals in red are the ones with the worst online presence (see complete key below). Note that BioNames is still a work in progress so there will be some journals that are online but I've simply not had a chance to add them to BioNames. With that in mind, there are some striking gaps in the digital availability of taxonomic publications. Several Russian journals (collectively publishing thousands of articles) are not online (the story here is somewhat complicated because some Russian journals also have English-language translations available but these are mostly recent articles). A number of large entomological journals are not available (perhaps not surprising given that most described animal taxa are insects). We can think of this as a 'league table' of literature availability. My hope is that digitising projects such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library will look at this and use it to help prioritise which journals to scan. In particular, if the journal is not pre-1923 (and therefore out of US copyright) I hope BHL will then contact the journal's publisher and see if they would be willing to add their journal to those (such as Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington) that have opened up their complete back catalogue to being scanned by BHL. I also hope that scientific societies or organisations that publish journals in the 'red' or 'orange' zones will consider digitising their journals and making their contents accessible to the wider community. We are reaching the point where if knowledge is not online then it effectively doesn't exist ..."