Open Access News

Imagine walking into your downtown library and finding that you can't check out a book without paying a fee. What you took for granted as a free service, you now have to pay for. A similar situation may soon face biologists who study biodiversity, the variety and number of species....Today, biodiversity databases are growing and struggling for funds --which may come in the form of private investment that could transform what is now an open, public resource reliant on government and nonprofit funding....Biodiversity databases, each with its own way to codify, organize and search data, have proliferated as experts in various taxonomic groups have built catalogs to meet their specific needs. (An example is the well-known FishBase.) The Catalogue of Life Programme is the biggest and boldest attempt to integrate these databases. It is a joint agreement between Species 2000 (acting as a coordinating umbrella organization), the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the Integrated Taxonomic Information Systems (ITIS). ITIS, the main U.S. contributor, is in turn a partnership of federal agencies and nonprofit organizations (themselves collaborations!) including NatureServe, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Smithsonian Institution and the National Biological Information Infrastructure. The organizational layers illustrate the complexity and cost of developing gigantic data sets as well as the extent of public-agency involvement....Stuart Pimm of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University agrees: "So many of the data are collected by state and federal agencies, there is enormous public pressure to keep access open." A hint of private interest in the growing databases came in January 2004, when Thomson Scientific, the world's largest information corporation, acquired Biosis, known for indexing and abstracting life-sciences journals. Biosis managed the Zoological Record, whose computers had hosted the Species 2000 project to that point. With the acquisition, Thomson now hosted the Species 2000 database, an arrangement that continues. Although Jim Pringle, Thomson's vice president of development, says the company does not have definite plans to privatize biodiversity data, Thomson promptly applied to become a member of Species 2000. Frank Bisby, executive director of Species 2000, said the Species 2000 directors "took advice … and decided that [it] was not appropriate for a subsidiary of a major multinational."