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It's a big problem, made worse by the fact the AKA has more killifish reference materials than anybody on the planet by virtue of historical timing and mandate ("dissemination of information about killifish") it's a little difficult to understand. But there may be a flaw in an underlying assumption here that aquarists are great at website and magazine production, that is, professional grade curation of a small museums worth of information isn't a skill one develops by osmosis as a side effect of being able to breed Nothos or whatever.
I registered the aka domain and ran the website from Canada until the guys in the US knew enough to take it over, this seemed a pretty natural thing to do since I'd been running the killies list since 1986 which happened to be the first tropical fish resource of any sort on the net.
My concern is less for the information that is already online(things like archive.org work well) so that isn't going to go away, what I'm more concerned with is the printed information in boxes of dusty old books in basements and files not available online like all the show results gong back to the late 80s when we began using computers in the hobby. In a blink of an eye this could be all gone.
Huber mentioned this - he was talking about the relative merits of publishing in TFH/PFK or things like AKA and BKA club bulletins and suggested it was better to publish in TFH or PFK because scientists are far more likely to be able to get a back issue in 20 years of a commercial magazine distributed to libraries than a specialty hobby publication that can be very difficult to obtain despite the fact it's more "on topic" for that publication than a beginners away magazine.
The issues here are not technical but if there is a willingness to do something about it I'm sure that'll coalesce into something useful we can all be proud of.
This Facebook post on Jan 2 2015 was in response to Tim Addis of the BKA wondering where the AKA site went to not being to find his material.
Minor syntactic revisions (above) made in June 2017 and one new comment:
Well in the two years since this issue popped up the following happened:
1) AKA site was down again, it's back up now.
2) TFH went to bi-monthly
3) The AKA and perhaps other clubs spend a lot of time and money on publishing paper. TFH just cut back by half. I couldn't make any sense of this,half your costs plus half your income, how does that help? When you understand the magazine is sold at a loss so promote book sales it makes sense. As long as it's at the checkout aisle when you buy your first tank the don't care which issue it is as long as the ads in it work, so now it makes sense. Didn't PFK or Aquarist and Pondkeeper do this in the 70s or 80s?
4) Consider a world where the AKA or similar clubs publish nothing. Instead they give this month's killifish news to the magazine who print a couple of pages so instead of a killi column written by one guy it's the distilled result of the advancement of the art in that country that month - new collections, expeditions, and breeding reports that show how the killi world improved that month. We do this already, informally on facebook. If it costs less to do this why on earth would we want to continue with a bunch of fish geeks trying to publish a magazine, especially at a time when even the first and biggest magazine just cut back by half? So really the change would be you get a PDF instead of paper,which TFH does already, and if you insist on paper it's in TFH go buy one or it comes already if you subscribe or download the PDF and take it to kinkos.
As a nature conservancy organization it behooves us I think to get out of the dead tree and toxic ink business.
1) Jean Huber
2) Tyrone Genade
I share Huber's sentiments about scientific stuff and have had this discussion with people who publish scientific info in hobby publications.It is impossible getting hold of the abstract, the material isn't filed with any archiving agency or uploaded to sites like Scopus/PubMed etc... meaning that it virtually doesn't exist beyond the few 100 non-scientists who receive the specialized publication.
When I was trying assemble the original info on N. furzeri it was something like a treasure hunt. Without Bobby Ellermann's knowledge of the old publications I would never have found the materials.
I fully support Huber's Killi-data.org as a scientific vehicle for information gathering and dissemination as well as a hobbyist guide. I think, if you want to publish killifish science outside of mainstream journals like Zootaxa etc..., then Killi-data is the place to do it.