Hi @pisum
You are correct in identifying the separation. However that is one of my questions - At what stage does material “advertised for as such & gathered” belong to the collector (inaturalist or anyone else) as intellectual ownership and why does not the observer get a “equal proportionate right” for having taken the effort to document with meta data.
I think the “Citations” that ignore contributions when the whole “research body so to speak” is based on those very same “contributions” is quite unfair
I read this as well [quote=“pisum, post:5, topic:19736”]
Looking for advice on how to cite a project - General - iNaturalist Community Forum.)
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Here I see that some one has tried to make a distinction between where additional material has been in the form of a journal, or posts or some of the data has been curated to say that the site admin’s should be authors. So here the “effort” is the question - the time to make one observation - one of 1000’s, versus some other effort to curate and analyse, draw some conclusions. The key question is Would the latter be possible without the former (set of observations). I think the answer is No. Without that data set of observations there would be no article and there would be no citation.
Why should this be different - because one picture / observation is used - I don’t see why the logic should not apply for all / or many such observations. Each providing a valuable data point.
I understand the “unwieldiness” of maybe 1000’s of names when using inaturalist data. But take away the observations and the “admin / chief editors” are left with nothing
Ram