kcranston
commented
8 years ago We haven't had this suggestion before. I wonder if people would want these notifications, or if they would be viewed as spam. We don't do anything with user information at the moment (instead relying on GitHub authentication, notification, etc). So, adding this functionality would be a fair amount of work.
When curating their phylogenies from publications, we could collect their emails and notify the authors that their phylogenies are curated in OT. There could be a module in OT to facilitate this process. Authors of the original publications have the most vested interest in their organisms and their phylogenies. Notifying authors will serve several purposes (1) it will foster stronger ties between OT and the broad phylogenetics community and generate greater awareness of OT from phylogenetics researchers; (2) it will potentially enhance the quality of study curation if original authors can provide expertise opinions; (3) it will perhaps also help strengthen the provenance of the data, by establishing a direct link between a author to a study, which isn't necessarily the current model (where most studies are curated by non-authors).