[open-science] [Open-access] Attribution, Rights and Licensing of names and compilations of names

[Donat Agosti]

Dear Peter

 

This is not about "notes in the pocket" but about creating a reference name server for all the existing names including links to their original citation. Names play the integration function in Biology and they are semilegal ruled by Codes. We thus cannot have somewhere on our computer a little cache where we have the few names we are interested in but need to have an open infrastructure.

Currently there are ca 1.9M species described, but no catalogue exists. The situation is furthermore marred by the fact that there are synonyms of various kinds, misidentication and thus tons of name usages. A chaos at best.

 

The good thing though is that we have movements to clean this up. On the one hand we have increasing large silos of names, like GNA; we have a Biodiversity Heritage Library that finds names in albeit often badly OCRed text, often in not very useful way, but that can change with better tools; we have initiatives to make names more useful, like Zoobank; we have registration of new names in Mycology (fungi), or electronic published zoological names. And we have an advanced publisher, that produces semantically enhanced linked  publications (eg Zookeys).

 

There are also some initiatives now on the way, some EU and NSF funded, to work towards this large ambitious goal. 

 

A decisive factor will be how much of the published record will become open access (ca 2,000 journals or books per year create fully or partially taxonomic content) and thus add to the growing body of open access text.

 

There is also a confusion of what is copyright (protection of a work) and what is protection for a lot of work (I worked on this all my life, why should somebody else have free access) or scientific advantage of having a compilation of names. Finally there is also the issue of database protection in the EU, though I think most don't understand this either.

 

For that reason it is important to show on the one hand the advantage of having access to this reference system and integrate it into the scientific publishing process. At the same time, it is worthwhile from time to time to remind that a discussion on copyright is better run by specialists, similar to have taxonomists make taxonomic decisions.

 

Cheers

Donat

 

 

From: open-science-bounces at lists.okfn.org [mailto:open-science-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Peter Murray-Rust
Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2013 3:11 PM
To: Ross Mounce
Cc: open-science; open-access at lists.okfn.org
Subject: Re: [open-science] [Open-access] Attribution, Rights and Licensing of names and compilations of names

 

Wonderful - thanks Ross.

I would be optimistic (with no hard evidence!) that we will see a shift towards Open. This has happened with GLAM (e.g. Libraries and Museums) and it may be valuable for use to prepare arguments and examples of Openness.

In our own project I assume we can use these resources privately as checklists even if we don't publish the lists and make our own semi-definitive list of species-in-the-literature. Of course I am aware of all sorts of error, ambiguity, etc.




-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069 

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