Copyright, Biopiracy and the Taxonomic Impediment

Donat Agosti

Naturhistorisches Museum der Burgergemeinde Bern, Switzerland

andAmerican Museum of Natural History, New York, USA

Access to ant taxonomic publications through antbase.org /Smithsonian Institution, including currently the entire body of non-copyrighted publications since 1758 (>4,000 publications or 85,000 pages covering 11840 species. Source: (Agosti 2005)

Copyright

This seems little better than biopiracy:taking biodiversity material from thedeveloping world for profit, without sharingbenefit or providing the people who live therewith access to this crucial information.

Biopiracy

(Agosti, 2006 Nature 439: 392)

Taxonomic Impediment

Conservation of biodiversity is not anymore an important political agenda item.

It is generally recognized that we do have a rather poor, anecdotal knowledge on the world‘s biodiversity. We do not even have a catalogue of the known species, nor the tools to identify most of them (e.g. Global Taxonomy Initiative GTI).

Knowledge of all the world‘s species is one problem, but ACCESS to the published record of the ca 1,5Million known is the other which almost immediately can be resolved.

Even if the technical issues are resolved, current copyright policies will not allow to build up a global information system.

Taxonomic Impediment

Can systematics publications be copyrighted?• factual knowledge• cultural heritage (Universal Declaration on Cult.Div.)• access and benefit sharing (CBD)

Why ought they to be open access – ethic issues?• Conservation Commons• Biodiversity Crisis: unability to to identify and thus

protect biodiversity• descriptions equals gen sequences• impediment for future research: the genomics case.• fusion of retro- and prospective data dissemination

SolutionsAll systematics publications are open access (eg creative

commons licence; subsription to Conservation Commonns principles)

The content of all systematics publications is open access: eg mark-up and exposure of publications; self respositories

All descriptions are open access (description = gen sequence): eg mark-up and exposure of descriptions; submission of descriptions to dedicated databases, such as ZooBank or taxon specific DB

Abandoning traditional publications and integrating publications into populations process of DB. (publication = version control of knowledge)

What is a systematics publication – or what to systeamtists do?

They are part of a more or less closed system

Taxonomic Impediment

Scanning

Pdf-conversion

(WWW)

Electronic revolution? Not yet.

One Step closer…

From text document to XML-document

Tax

on-x

sc

hem

a

ms submission(„Taxon-x-version“)

new ms alertPosting for review

Edited ms

Revised msPublication: pdf

Publication: hard copy

Publication database(„taxon-x-version“)

ontology

bibliography

analysis & ms preparation

Zoobank

Character DB

Specimen DB

Description DB

Distribution DB

Char. Matrix DB

Phyl. Tree DB

Char-state Im.

Specimen Im.

Habitat Image

Leg. Publicat.

Tax

on D

B

New Data

feedback

Accepted ms

New taxon alert

Where the past meets the future: deconstruction and machine generation of publications

The New Taxonomy: a point of view

1: Taxon Data Standard2: Taxon Transfer Protocol3: Applications

TaxonDB (1)

Input

Query

Response

(2)

variaDBs

(3)

Change Notification system

(3)

Usage of published data: data mash-ups

Taxonomic Impediment

Can systematics publications be copyrighted?• factual knowledge• cultural heritage• access and benefit sharing (CBD)

Why ought they to be open access – ethic issues?• Conservation Commons• Biodiversity Crisis: unability to to identify and thus

protect biodiversity• descriptions equals gen sequences• impediment for future research: the genomics case.• fusion of retro- and prospective data dissemination

SolutionsAll systematics publications are open access (eg creative

commons licence; subsription to Conservation Commonns principles)

The content of all systematics publications is open access: eg mark-up and exposure of publications; self respositories

All descriptions are open access (description = gen sequence): eg mark-up and exposure of descriptions; submission of descriptions to dedicated databases, such as ZooBank or taxon specific DB

Abandoning traditional publications and integrating publications into populations process of DB. (publication = version control of knowledge)

The Argentine Ant

(Linepithema humile)

A well known ant

Search using the vernacular name

Search using the currently valid scientific name „Linepithema humile“

HNS20351 Wild, A. L. 2004. Taxonomy and distribution of the Argentine ant, Linepithema humile (Hymenoptera:

Formicidae). Ann. Entomol. Soc. Amer. 97(6): 1204-1215. (http://antbase.org/ants/publications/20351/20351.pdf)

6 variants of the name Linepithema humile

+

Linepithema humileHypoclinea (Iridomyrmex) humilis Mayr Hypoclinea humilis Mayr Iridomyrmex humilis (Mayr) Linepithema humile (Mayr) Linepithema riograndense (Borgmeier) Linepithema humile angulatum Iridomyrmex humilis subsp. angulatus Linepithema humile arrogansIridomyrmex humilis var. arrogansIridomyrmex humilis st. breviscapa Santschi Linepithema humile breviscapum (Santschi) Dorymyrmex gallardoi Brèthes Linepithema humile gallardoi (Brèthes) Linepithema humile humile (Mayr) Iridomyrmex humilis r. platensis Forel Linepithema humile platense (Forel) Iridomyrmex humilis st. scotti Santschi Linepithema humile scotti (Santschi)

19 Variants

Taxonomic Impediment

Solution:

Either make all systematics publications online accessible

Allow the actual descriptions be open access, not the entire publication

Biopiracy

The potential of the OA movement, he argues, doesn’t begin with policy conditions aimed at altering the operating conditions for a small subset of journal publishers. Rather, it needs a much broader-based effort to make institutional self-archiving a routine and unquestioned part of the work of scholarship – as basic as including bibliographies and reference lists at the end of any paper.

How do academics feel about self-archiving? “Authors haven’t picked it up,” says Dr. Willinsky at UBC. “It has a lot to do with the fact that the focus of [academics’] work is getting published, not getting circulated.”

John Lorinc The bottom line on open accessby University Affairs, March 2006

Stevan Harnard and Tim Brody, 2004. Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals. D-Lib Magazine, June 2004, Volume 10 Number 6Figure 1 shows the total number of journal articles in physics indexed by the Institute of Scientific Information from 1992-2001 (gray), the percentage of these that have been made open-access (OA) by author self-archiving (green), and the ratio of the citation counts for the OA articles to the citation counts for the non-OA articles (red). (Analyses are by Brody et al. (2004) and are based on the ®ISI CD-ROM* citation database metadata and references from 14,000,000 articles in 7,000 leading journals from 1991 to 2001 licensed to the Observatoire des sciences et des technologies <http://www.ost.qc.ca> and from the 260,000 articles self-archived in <http://www.arxiv.org>.)

• FURTHER RECOGNIZING that under Article 17 of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Parties shall facilitate the exchange of information, from all publicly available sources, relevant to the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity, taking into account the special needs of developing countries;

“…we propose a dual strategy, one that contractually reinforces the public domain for data that exists within the ambit of the federal government and another that contractually reconstructs a research commons for data (and other forms of information) in academia and the private sector. We argue that excessively rigid efforts to keep scientific data free of private control will end by yielding less and less data to the public domain, whereas a contractually reconstructed commons for data, while less pure in theory, will in practice make more data more accessible for research purposes in the long run.

H. Reichman and Paul F. Uhlir, “A contractually reconstructed research commons for scirntific data in a highly protectionist intellectual property environment,” Law and Contemporary Problems Vol. 66:315-462 Winter-Spring 2003.

Approved by 148 against 2 votes (4 abstentions) by the General Conference of UNESCO in Paris, October 20

Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity

ARTICLE 6 Towards access for all to cultural diversity

While ensuring the free flow of ideas by word and image, care should be exercised that all cultures can express themselves and make themselves known.Freedom of expression, media pluralism, multilingualism, equal access to art and to scientific and technological knowledge, including in digital form, and the possibility for all cultures to have access to the means of expression and dissemination are the guarantees of cultural diversity.