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Public Domain Image Databases for Taxonomic Research and Education:
A Case Study, Protist Image Database
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Public organization for quality-control and preservation of the voluntary-delivered biodiversity resources

To establish volunteer databases as academic resources, therefore, they must be qualified and permanently preserved by public organizations like journals stored in public libraries (Fig. 6). For example, databases or any other information publicized through the Internet by individuals or its groups (mostly researchers) can be qualified by a committee authorized by academic society or its alternatives. If they are qualified to have enough value as research and/or educational resources, the committee should issue "accession codes" for the database contents and, at the same time, the contents should be backuped by public organizations (e.g. "Support centers" in Fig. 6). When the original databases were updated, only the updated files should be added to the backup files by the centers. On this system, the "accession codes" can be used as references in papers similar to accession numbers in genome databases, and by checking the codes, users can access to the backuped contents even after the original databases (or web sites) disappeared from the net due to retirement of researchers or some other reasons.
These quality-control and preservation systems will be needed for all kinds of academic resources voluntary-delivered on the Internet. Establishing these systems are urgent especially in taxonomy where vast amount of biodiversity resources are demanded to be databased and opened for public uses.


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