Attribution, Rights and Licensing of scientific names of organisms and compilation of names

Plazi participated in a workshop, held at Arizona State University, April 15 -17, 2013

The Global Names Project invited to a workshop to explore options and to make
recommendations as to issues that relate to attribution, rights and licensing of names and compilations of names. The aim of the workshop that was held from April 15 to 17, 2013, at the Arizona State University in Tempe was the elaborating of a report that clarifies if and how we share names.

The workshop led together a group of biologists with lawyers working in the sector of biology. The group headed by David J. Patterson (Global Names Project) was composed of David Eades (Catalogue of Life), George Garrity (Names4Life Services), Charles Miller (Global Names Project / Tropicos), Jonathan Rees (Open Trees) and Dave Remsen (Global Biodiversity Information Facility). The legal experts were Romy Drysdale (General Counsel at Arizona Technology Enterprises), Willi Egloff (Plazi), Puneet Kishor (Creative Commons) and Art Lee (General Counsel for Arizona State Univerity).

The group widely agreed that taxonomic names as well as compilations of taxonomic names are established following standardized criteria and in a standardized language. As copyright does not protect content, but individual forms of presentation, neither names nor compilations of names do qualify as works in the sense of copyright law. Consequently, there is no ownership in names and compilations of names and therefore no space for licensing. Names and compilations of names belong to the public domain.

Acknowledging the lacking legal base for any intellectual property, the main question arose how to give attribution to scientific data elaborated by others. Even if there is no ownership in a juridical sense, there is a scientific and ethical necessity to cite the scientists who had originally created the names and their compilations. The report that will resume the results obtained during the workshop shall design guidelines to a planned code of conduct on attribution of scientific names of organisms and compilations of names.

Start of the EU funded project Pro-iBiosphere

September 1, 2012 is the starting date of the EU funded project Pro-iBiosphere. Biodiversity core data and information constitutes an important source of knowledge for many disciplines. In order to facilitate access to this knowledge, technical and semantic interoperability barriers need to be addressed.These activities will prepare the ground for an integrative system for intelligent management of biodiversity knowledge. A system that facilitates open access to taxonomic data is essential because it will allow a sustainable provision of high quality data to partners and users, including e-science infrastructure projects as well as global initiatives on biodiversity informatics. The kick-off meeting will take place in Leiden, September 27/28, as well as the launch of the respective Web site.

The 1000st marked-up publication on Plazi

The 1000st marked-up publication has been uploaded by Thomas Stierfhof on September 29. This publication includes Plazi's treatments 15821 and 15822 of Hoplophthiracarus and Hoplophthiracarus pavidus respectively.

Plazi at the Life and Literature Conference, Chicago, November 14/15, 2011

the Biodiversity Heritage Library is organizing a conference, Life and Literature, that will convene librarians, biologists, computer scientists, publishers, students, and other stakeholders to set the agenda for biodiversity literature digitizing and its networked environment for the next four to five years.

Plazi at the International Botanical Congress, Melbourne, July 25, 2011

Donat Agosti will present a lecture on XML based markup and a poster authored by Guido Sautter will be available. The abstracts are available as pdf.

MycoKeys launched, July 19, 2011

MycoKeys – a new journal in systematic and biology of fungi (including lichens) has been launched by Pensoft Publishers,based on Taxpub NLM DTD.

Plazi at the Cybertaxonomy meeting at the Biosynthesis Center at the Field Museum in Chicago, May 30 - June 2, 2011

The goal of the meeting is to develop practical tools and strategies to transfer taxonomic data to major online resources including EOL.

Description of Taxpub elements available, March 23, 2011

The descriptions of the Taxpub NLM DTD taxonomic elements are now published. A description of Taxpub is available.

Donat Agosti is presenting a lecture Biodiversity Literature for the 21st Century at the Scripting Life meeting in Paris.

Taxpub presentation at JATS-Con, November 2, 2010; Bethesda

Terry Catapano presents the paper Taxpub: An Extension of the NLM/NCBI Journal Publishing DTD for Taxonomic Descriptions at the JATS-Con 2010. It outlines the history, structure and pros and con of the approach chosen to create Taxpub.

Phytokeys uses Taxpub. November 1, 2010

Phytokeys is the second journal that is based on Taxpub and extending the use of the DTD to botany.

Plazi meeting at Harvard's Herbarium, October 2-3, 2010

A tecnical face to face meeting of Plazi members to assess the current status of ongoing work, assess the development of taxpub and other ongoing projects.

Plazi at TDWG Woods Hole Conference, November 26 -30, 2010

Plazi team members participate at the annual TDWG meeting in Woods Hole and present the following lectures in the Mass Digitization Projects and Electronic Publications for Scientists, Librarians, Publishers and Informaticians symposium: Semantic tagging, semantic enhancements and XML-based editorial workflow from the viewpoint of a biodiversity publisher (Lyubomir Peneve and The future of Informatics in digital literature – or literature and its (digital) future (Donat Agosti) and computer demo Let Taxonomists do Taxonomists‘ Work – even in Legacy Literature Digitization & Markup (Guido Sautter.

Zookeys uses Taxpub. June 30, 2010

A very productive collaboration with Zookeys/Pensoft led to the first usage of taxpub, our NLM publishing and archiving DTD extension that has been created with the support from NLM. This also includes a journal production workflow to handle XML as well as multiple ways to submit manuscripts from a text to a highly fine grained marked document. More

Taxonomy information exchange-paper shortlisted for the BioMed Central Open Data award. June 2010

Our paper describing Plazi's information exchange policy (Agosti & Egloff, 2009) has been shortlisted on the BMC Open Access prize, despite not fulfilling the original requirements of being a data centric paper explained in Cameron Neylon's, one of the judges, blog.

Plazi at the 7th International Congress of Hymenopterists, June 20-26, 2010

Donat Agosti is presenting a lecture "The future of taxonomic communication and publishing" and with Lyubo Penev is participating on a group discussion "A new model for the journal of Hymenoptera Research" More...

PLoS Semantic Tagging Workshop, April 9-11, 2010

Integrating semantic markup of taxonomic and systematic biology elements in the PLoS Biodiversity and Systematic Hub.

Plazi General Assembly, Karlsruhe, March 3-7, 2010

Plazi's general assembly will be held at the Staatliches Museum of Naturkunde in Karlsruhe. An emphasis will be on prospective publishing, future trends and reassessing ongoing work.

Plazi at Zukunft des Urheberrechts – Interessenausgleich oder Paradigmenwechsel?

Donat Agosti is representing the science case at 9th annual meeting of the SF-FS Urheberrechtstagung at the Eidgenössisches Institut für Geistiges Eigentum, Bern.

Plazi at the School of Public Health, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Teheran, Iran, January 19, 2010

Donat Agosti presented and invited lecture "The impact of information technology: Prospects in biodiversity research and communication" to initiate the discussions leading to joint projects.

Plazi at the Enhanced Taxonomic Publications meeting, National Libraries of Medicine, Bethesday, MD, January 4-5, 2010

In collaboration with the National Library of Medicine, Plazi organized a workshop to enhance the current draft of taxpub a taxonomy specific NLM publishing and archiving DTD for prospective publishing.

Plazi at the Simpòsio de Mirmecologia, Ouro Preto, MG, Brazil, November 17-21, 2009

Christiana Klingenberg and Donat Agosti presented a lecture and a training course at the XIX Simpòsio de Mirmecologia, explaining issues regarding open access to content of taxonomic data, and to teach converting taxonomic publications into semantically enhanced documents that can be easily harvested and disseminated over the Internet. A special emphasis has been given to literature covering ants of the Neotropical region.

Plazi at TDWG, Montpellier, France, Nov 15, 2009

Guido Sautter will demonstrate at TDWG Plazi's newest asset, a community mark up server. The demo is titled "Plazi: Building Communities and Software for Increasing the Utility of Digitized Biodiversity Publications.

Species Profile Model project successfully concluded

In collaboration with Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) and GBIF, Plazi has developed a web service providing treatments in Species Profile Model (SPM) format allowing EOL and other interested parties to consume and automatically publish taxonomic treatments. More (Nov 5, 2009)

Plazi at the Iranian Research Institute of Plant Protection (IRIPP), Teheran, October 26, 2009

Donat Agosti is presenting and invited lecture on "New ways in e-publishing and e-communication" seen from the point of view of Plazi.

Plazi at ArtDatabanken Meeting Stockholm (Sept. 21-24)

Donat Agosti and Guido Sautter will be lecturing and teaching at the ArtDatabanken course. The course will focus on topics relevant to compiling, organizing, and contributing the digitized results of their research to community resources as well as further use of these data in their own studies. ArtDatabanken has underscored the importance of contributing research data to institutional natural history databases, Dynamisk Taxa/Artportalen, GBIF, Morphbank, and CBOL (Consortium for the Barcode of Life) in the contracts it issues for Svenska artprojektet funding. Success in accomplishing this is directly related to the skills and experience (and motivation) of individual researchers, who are certain to compile datasets during the duration of their work and would benefit from a better understanding of how these issues apply to their current (or upcoming) digitization protocols.

Plazi at the e-biosphere Conference in London (June 2, 2009)

Donat Agosti will participate on panel 6 at the e-biosphere conference discussing cultural challenges related to data sharing, open access and intellectual property right in the biodiversity community.

Plazi Partners With Encyclopedia of Life (EOL)

Encyclopedia of Life and Plazi partner in a pioneering work to provide access to taxonomic descriptions extracted from the published record. This collaboration includes application of the Species Page Model (SPM) RDF Vocabulary developed by Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) to facilitate exchange of descriptive data. EOL has begun harvesting data provided by Plazi for inclusion in species pages on their website.

Copyright Sexier than Sexual Intercourse

Plazi Board Members Donat Agosti and Willi Egloff's recent paper "Taxonomic information exchange and copyright: the Plazi approach" climbs to #2 on BMC Research Notes: Most viewed articles in past 30 days list, edging out "Factors associated with self-reported first sexual intercourse in Scottish adolescents"
Post script: Our joy did not last into 2010. The old wisdom is the old wisdom... BUT: we still have the great pleasure to find our paper on position 8 of 260 most accessed published papers in BMC Research Notes for 2010.

Forthcoming Meetings

March 3-7, 2010
Plazi General Assembly
Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde, Karlsruhe, Germany.

Past Meetings

January 4-5, 2010
Enhanced Taxonomic Publications Meeting
National Libraries of Medicine
Bethesday
taxpub

November 17-21, 2009
XIX Simpòsio de Mirmecologia
Ouro Preto, Brazil
lectures and training course
Christiana Klingenberg, Donat Agosti

June 22-23, 2009
Scientific publishing in natural history institutions (EDIT)
Willi Egloff (invited speaker)

June 1 - 3, 2009
E-biosphere Conference London
Donat Agosti (invited panelist)

May 23, 2009
Nomina Meeting
Woods Hole
Guido Sautter

December 9, 2008
CNI Washington DC
Terry Catapano, Donat Agosti

December 1, 2008
Swedish Biodiversity Informatics Symposium, Stockholm
Willi Egloff, Donat Agosti

October 30, 2008
Atlas of Living Australia, Canberra
Terry Catapano, Guido Sautter, Donat Agosti
Lectures and Demo of Plazi

October 27-29, 2008
Australian Museum, Sydney

October 19-25, 2008
TDWG Perth
Terry Catapano, Bob Morris, Guido Sautter, Rich Pyle and Donat Agosti participated at the TDWG conference in Perth, October 2008. The lectures and two tutorials have been contributed.