So I say it’s shady for several reasons:
First, as other people have already stated, we have the “mockbuster” problem. For those not familiar with the term, a mockbuster is a cheap movie released via VOD/rental/etc to coincide with the release of a well-advertised big budget movie, with a similar name to trick people into purchasing it thinking it’s the other movie. So like Transmorphers, which was released at the same time as Transformers, or Abraham Lincoln vs Zombies, released at the same time as Abraham Lincoln vs Vampires, etc. By naming the organization after an existing group with a long history of ornithology, they are trying to cash in on that recognition. If the AOU makes a change people may get it legitimately confused with the AOS’s changes, just causing confusion
Secondly, we have the “journal” itself, which as others say just seems to exist as a webpage. It’s missing most of the basics I would expect for a journal that seems to want to publish other people’s work. There is no author’s guidelines page, no information on editorial board, or anything like that. The people who are named seem to just be the authors of the checklist, three of which are based at U of Alaska and all four of them Alaska focused (obviously makes sense for a checklist), but this does produce skepticism for a “organization” that seeks to represent the entire Americas. There IS however a donation page, there is basically a trigger warning page, and a lot of not terribly useful stuff. While they say the journal is free to publish in they also suggest a donation of 4000 dollars. Which is not that different from often cited costs by well established journals, which this isn’t.
Really the organization seems to just exist because the authors have some problems with the AOS (and Avilist???). Which again…is fine. But when SACC separated for similar reasons, they immediately sought affiliation with an existing mainstream bird organization.
So again, there are a lot of weird moves that make me wonder what folks were thinking. I mean…if they just wanted to publish their checklist, I am sure U of Alaska Fairbank’s museum has the ability to do so…most museums do. I have trouble seeing many people lining up to publish here, and I am skeptical they have the ability to produce and maintain their own independent checklist.
