1. Copyright, Biopiracy and
the Taxonomic Impediment
Donat Agosti
Naturhistorisches Museum der Burgergemeinde Bern,
Switzerland
and
American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA

2. 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

3. This seems little better than biopiracy:
taking biodiversity material from the
developing world for profit, without sharing
benefit or providing the people who live there
with access to this crucial information.
Biopiracy
(Agosti, 2006 Nature 439: 392)

4. 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

5. What is a systematics publication – or what do systematists do?
They are part of a more or less closed system
Taxonomic Impediment

6. Scanning
Pdf-conversion
(WWW)
Electronic revolution? Not yet.

7. One Step closer…

8. From text document to XML-document
Taxon-xschema

9. 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.
TaxonDB
New Data
feedback
Accepted ms
New taxon alert
Where the past meets the future: deconstruction and machine generation of publications

10. The New Taxonomy: a point of view
1: Taxon Data Standard
2: Taxon Transfer Protocol
3: Applications
Taxon
DB (1)
Input
Query
Response
(2)
varia
DBs
(3)
Change Notification system
(3)

11. Usage of published data: data mash-ups

12. 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

13. Solutions
All systematics publications are open access (eg creative
commons licence; subscription to Conservation
Commons 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)

15. The Argentine Ant
(Linepithema humile)
A well known ant

16. Search using the vernacular name

17. Search using the currently valid scientific name „Linepithema humile“

18. 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

19. +

20. Linepithema humile
Hypoclinea (Iridomyrmex) humilis Mayr
Hypoclinea humilis Mayr
Iridomyrmex humilis (Mayr)
Linepithema humile (Mayr)
Linepithema riograndense (Borgmeier)
Linepithema humile angulatum
Iridomyrmex humilis subsp. angulatus
Linepithema humile arrogans
Iridomyrmex humilis var. arrogans
Iridomyrmex 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

21. Taxonomic Impediment
Solution:
Either make all systematics publications online accessible
Allow the actual descriptions be open access, not the entire publication

22. Biopiracy

23. 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.

24. 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 access
by University Affairs, March 2006

25. 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 6
Figure 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>.)

26. • 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;

28. “…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.

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

30. 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.