Donat Agosti, Is Copyright Undermining Biodiversity Research and Conservation? A preprint from Biodiversite: Science et Gouvernance, L'Institut International du Développment Durable. Excerpt: 'Powerful PCs, the Internet, data exchange protocols, and more recently a cultural change among biodiversity scientists are rapidly developing into a huge international framework of biodiversity data. For example, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is now providing access to well over 45 million specimen records based at over 100 institutions world wide....At the same time, an increasing number of scientific journals are being disseminated both in paper as well as in electronic form over the Internet. However, there is one serious problem: copyright....Information on ants might serve as a good example. They are one of still few groups of organisms for which a complete, continually updated list of all the currently known 11826 species exists, a fast increasing access to high resolution type and other specimen imagery (e.g. antweb.org), and for which almost all the non-copyrighted articles, including the descriptions of new species, are online accessible, linked to by either the citations in the database, or the entire publications....The problem of providing access though is not the cost, but the copyright, which is strictly enforced by modern publishers (Figure 1), notably the most important ones, such as Elsevier, Harvard University Press, Blackwell, Australia's CSIRO, some of the scientific associations, and luckily only few scientists themselves. Generally, all the copyright advocates are in the developed world. Loss of revenue is given as the main reason by the copyright advocates to enforce it. But how is it that others such as California University Press, Springer Publishers, or the American Entomological Society allow their ant-related publications to be freely available online?...If we are serious about halting species loss, we have to know, what's out there. We can do this only if we pool openly all our information over the Internet. We can’t let this effort be undermined by economic self- interests.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/23/2005 10:48:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
