BioSophia

is a non-profit corporation whose scope is
to create, collect, organize and distribute
digital documents of biological literature

The background reasons of our project are many. We shall try to explain a few among the most important ones.

The degradation of the paper
Since the second half of the 19th century a lot of biological literature has been published either on very acid or on poor quality papers, a phenomenon particularly massive during war, autarchy and austerity times.
Such papers decay, and make often even relatively recent books and magazines so brittle to destroy themselves as soon as touched. Such decay, still, is not in direct relation to the number of existing copies - i.e. both "rare" and "common" items are menaced - and it's very difficult to struggle.
Restoring paper is in fact possible, but slow and expensive. Still, most of scientific literature is consulted every now and then, making difficult to detect decaying documents, as well as is preserved in specialized libraries of research-oriented centers, whose librarian personnel is usually scarce and but sufficient for everydays needs.

The waste of "digital richnesses"
It's our believe that nowadays scientific publications are almost totally computer-written.
Usually, an Author of a paper writes it on a computer, then sends a diskette or a file to an Editor; next steps are various interchange between the first, the second, one or more referees and the Typographer, interchange mostly made via computer. When anything is ready, i.e the research work is finally published, digital copies are trashed away.
Because it's also our firm believe that most of these printed publications will need one day to be patiently reconverted to digital formats, we wish to make anything in our possibilities to prevent to trash today what will be the richness of the libraries of tomorrow: in other words, our aim is to collect and to save "digital manuscripts" before they get lost.
Digital publications may be loved or not, but everyone must admit that they are most superior to paper ones for all that concerns easiness of distribution, retrieval, storage and copy - as well as they are by far less expensive. A paper copy is usually easier to consult, it's true, but it may be istantly generated, in case of need, from a digital version.

The bibliographical gap of poor and developing Countries
Literature documentation plays, or should play, a very important role in scientific research. Many students are obliged to spend more hours checking and retrieving what has been published on a special research-line rather than to contribute directly to it with their own work.
This means that it's a common mistake to think that in poor and developing countries scientific researches progress so slowly just because of the lack of "hardware" - i. e. expensive laboratory engines. There are many sectors of base research that can be undertook with modest instrumentation: if they are neglected, this often happens just because of the lack of "software", i. e. good libraries.
Historical libraries in fact either do not exist or, when they do, have often been emptied during decolonization phases; modern ones, then, have many financial problems to bring themselves up to date because of the increasing cost and volume of specialized literature.
BioSophia website design is voluntarily extremely plain to enable fast access even with obsolete computers and monitors, as well as to prevent downloading unnecessary stuff to people inhabiting Countries whose lines are either slow or unreliable.

The disappearance of old and rare books
In some branches of Biological research, e. g. Taxonomy, even two-centuries old books are not only historical documents, but research tools that keep on being used.
The corpus formed by these old books, booklets and magazines is immense. The «Catalogue of the Library of the British Museum of Natural History», published in the early years of the 20th century, is a minutely-written list approaching the 4.000 pages of titles only.
This huge corpus is, however, more and more rapidly decaying: many titles are presently known but for a few copies, sometimes only one, sometimes even... none.
Public libraries, in fact, are exposed - war times apart - to fires; we can remind those that lately involved the Los Angeles University as well as the Russian Academy of Sciences. This decay is slow: but, in the long run, we believe that the only effective way to save a book is to make and distribute copies of it.
On the private side, the decay has been catastrophic, mainly in the last decades of the 20th century. Many old Natural History volumes are in fact illustrated by nice engravings or handcoloured plates. These are highly priced on the market of decorative engravings, and this situation pushed thousands of unprincipled booksellers to dismember expensive books to obtain easier-to-sell unbound plates. This situation is, as it's easy to understand, perversely self-feeding: and, in a few years, the inheritance of several centuries of researches has been largely destroyed to be used to garnish lobbies' walls of professionals' offices.

Saving and indexing "digital magazines"
Where researchers are mostly young and accustomed with new technologies - e. g. among molecular biologists - more and more often bulletin boards and digital magazines replace, at least in part, traditional printed ones. The main scope of these magazines is to communicate now and quickly, and not always it's previewed to periodically archive and store the containts in safe places, where they could be retrieved even several years later.
We hope to serve this purpose too.

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