Open Access News

Donat Agosti has blogged some notes on the recent meeting, IPR and the web: challenges for taxonomy (London, February 20, 2008).  Excerpt:

..."You can only protect what you know..." and with literally no access to the more than 10 Millions of descriptions, and no clear strategy yet who to do this in the current misunderstood and applied copyright framework, we fare not very well.

Practical aspects publishing side came up only at the end of my lecture, and in discussions stressing the point that we need at least self archiving (Green Road) or better find ways for open access policy, that must assure that we do not sign any contracts and give a way exclusive rights to publishers....

Egloff gave a legal perspective (I think, he was one of the very few legal professionals in the room) which essentially would say that with his interpretation of the law, descriptions [of species] can not be copyrighted....It is also possible to temporarily make copies of publications for example in a process to mark them up and extract the descriptions....

My own presentation...[made] the case that we need to make content accessible, how we could do it (see plazi.org) by providing the tools to convert legacy publications into semantically enhanced publications with an emphasis on access to descriptions, as well as the respective infrastructure to provide access to them. There will be no single way to get there, so we need to consider the Green and Gold Road to open access, and furthermore whether we want to keep publishing descriptions the same old way or whether we better make sure we can use web publications and strive for comprehensive databases and ontologies providing a more or less uniform access to the publications....

This latter point has been stressed with Vince Smith and Dave Roberts points about Scratchpads.
One point that needs be explored is the question of why we begun to talk about publications in the first hand. Clearly, if we talk about simple access to pdf copies, there is little chance to succeed, besides implementing the Green Road, but which does not allow machine readable access....

It is time, that the scientists go back to square one. Science is about citations and free flow of information, and NOT copyright, which is a commercial issue....

Also see Donat's announcement of Plazi.org, the new OA repository for biological species descriptions, which was first unveiled at the IPR workshop.  Excerpt:

Knowledge of the actual number of species on planet Earth is one of the last frontiers in science. It is not known exactly how many species have been identified and described, much less the number of as yet undescribed species.

However, the species we do know are documented in well over hundred million pages of printed scientific books and journals. – This knowledge is hidden in libraries, and no single library holds all this knowledge....

Tagging the “boundaries” of a species description and identifying the species dealt with, supports discovery and retrieval of data not possible through Google. Mark-up of species descriptions permits queries, such as which are the "red ant in London", a very common form of query....

Plazi.org is a new Web based service that offers access to descriptions of species and an archive to store the publications as marked up documents. GoldenGate, a dedicated editor has been developed to mark up the publications supporting the extraction of descriptions, based on a TaxonX, an XML schema modeling the logic content of these publications. The Plazi Search and Retrieval Server, building on this systematic mark-up of texts, allows powerful search functions to find species descriptions, or even simple mention of species, permitting users to answer questions like: “Which species occur together”?

Plazi.org includes already more than 3,700 description of 3,000 taxa....All descriptions are machine readable and thus can be picked up for mash-ups or individual Websites....