Copyright, IPR, and no excuses

thanks to Vince Smith who bestowed me with James Boyle's latest book "The Public Domain", I cam across a very positive statement which confirms an answer I gave at the recent e-biosphere meeting in London, when somebody in the audience made the point, that laws are here to be followed:

"Contrary to what everyone has told you, the subject of intellectual property is both accessible and interesting: what people can understand, they can change - or pressure their legislator to change." [bold by me]

This should be one of the imperatives of the biodiversity community!

Help wanted to write book of life: another EOL blunder

There are about 400 biodiversity informatics people from all around the world sitting here in London talking about biodiversity informatics (e-biosphere, London), talking about where we stand with the biodiversity informatics, access to biodiversity information. The way it is communicated to the outside world is, that it is the US and the UK who develop the book of life. What about all the rest? What about all the contributors needed to fill their shell?

I think this is an odd flaw in communication that should not happen. EOL with their experience in PR can not blame BBC that they did not get the point.
If I would be a EU-commissioner, I would definitely question what all the taxpayers money do, same for the Australians.

I also think, it is pretty much stressing the point that the North does it all.




BBC online, June 1, 2009


"A virtual book of all life on Earth is being created by UK and US scientists.

The online reference work will create a detailed world map of flora and fauna and track changes in biodiversity.

The database, dubbed a "macroscopic observatory', will be populated with data about local species gathered by members of the public.

Early elements of the giant database, such as automatic species identification systems, are already under construction.

Field guide

Over time the database will log shifts in species and other data such as changes in the density of forests and when plants first flower.

The backers of the idea hope that the vast, virtual book of life will eventually be comparable to the global system used to watch for and record earthquakes.

The ongoing project will constantly gather data so it can plot information about the range and abundance of plants and animals as worldwide temperature and rainfall patterns shift in response to climate change.

Details held on the database will include everything from gross anatomical details down to individual genes.

"We are creating a virtual observatory for world biodiversity, where environmental observations, specimen data, experimental results, and sophisticated modelling can be done across all levels of biodiversity - from genes to ecosystems," said James Edwards, executive director of the Encyclopedia of Life, in a statement.

The Encyclopedia, based at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, and the London's Natural History Museum are the key backers of the project. The push to create the observatory was unveiled at the e-Biosphere 09 conference held from 1-3 June in London.

As well as logging long-term changes brought about by climate change, the creators of the online observatory hope it will bring more tangible benefits.

It could give early warnings about invasive species or, for example, give insights into the timing, altitude and route of bird migrations in ways that could reduce bird strike numbers on aircraft.

The observatory would also serve as a hi-tech field guide for anyone who wanted to identify animals, insects, trees or flowers they found while on holiday or near their home.

Within 10 years, expect its backers, all aspects of the database will be available. Some parts of the system, such as images of species, maps of the seas and gene sequences to help with DNA barcoding, are already in use. "

e-biosphere London

I am on my way to sit on panel 6 at the forthcoming e-biosphere meeting in London. Wouter Los produced this abstract for our pannel, where we should talk about how bioinformatics is changing community policies and practices in areas such as data sharing, intellectual property rights, and open access publication.

"The worlds of Biodiversity Knowledge and of Informatics are meeting at exiting interfaces. There are the scientific and technical challenges to get a grip on the complexity of these interfaces. But especially cultural and sociological contraints put a barrier on what is technologically achievable. What works and does not in the effort to get people to share biodiversity data? What are the perspectives of the dataprovider (enablers), and what can we learn from experiences in contributing institutions?
The need and role of data publishing regimes can be discussed in facilitating increased discovery and access to primary biodiversity data. There are socio-political barriers and the question is how to overcome these. Which are the appropriate policies? We still work like twenty years ago and biodiversity informatics is not part of a biodiversity science curriculum. The science structure did not change and adopt neither to global questions nor follow globalization in science, eg Internet and digitalization and with that potential of sharing data. We will stay in the past century when there is no commitment from our institutions to collectively open up biodiversity information.
Biodiversity information and knowledge is structured and would assume a global biodiversity infrastructure created from top down. Such important initiatives were implemented in the last years. However, real innovation comes from a rapidly increasing number of individual scientists that open up their archives and often ingenious bits of software assembled from an even more incredible amount of tools that serve their best interests. They are seeing the advantage to collaborate in small but increasingly fast growing clubs that enhance their scientific process of discovery, and are willing to share their knowledge beginning with semantically enhanced, cross-linked publications. Classic intellectual property rights on information are replaced by other values.
“Community” is important to biodiversity scientists, as it is for people in general. Which are the approaches and tools that provide individual, social rewards when individuals and institutions foster broad knowledge sharing and the public good. What are the roles of cooperation, Darwinian competition, and trust in data sharing? What are the boundaries of a biodiversity research community or of traditional “owners” of information and knowledge? And do we have to consider a balance between the conditions for bottom-up and top-down approaches or just for a single straight forward solution?
"

So, what are those issues? Has biodiversity informatics really changed something in our communities, or rather enabled to continue with more of the same but in a faster way? Does this BI really change our modus operandi?

Here another twist to the decade *: Is biodiversity missing out again in the current closing of the digital divide?

There are two relevant articles to this issue: one in BBC-online that states
" How ridiculous then that over the last three months, climate change has had 1,382 mentions in British national newspapers.
Yet, during the same period, biodiversity was mentioned just 115 times."

The second one in today's Tagesanzeiger, a Swiss newspaper asking the question "Gibt es in Afrika bald ein Silicon Valley" and continues" Jetzt brauchen Schulen in Timbuktu statt ganzer Bibliotheken nur noch ein paar Secondhand-Computer, um den Lernenden Zugang zum gesammelten Wissen der Welt zu verschaffen."

This refers to Jeff Sachs and his conclusions (see eg in his article "The digital war on poverty, Aug 21, 2008" in the Guardian) that the digital divide is now closing to the very great advantage of the developing world.

"Moreover, market penetration in poor countries is rising sharply. India has around 300 million subscribers, with subscriptions rising by a stunning eight million or more per month. Brazil now has more than 130 million subscribers, and Indonesia was estimated to reach 120 million. In Africa, which contains the world's poorest countries, the market is soaring, with more than 280 million subscribers."

So, we talk about getting a list of names up in the next decade or so, whilst the world around us wants content, such as publications, images, specimen and related data as starting point to find out, what is known about a species, which is a pest species, etc.

There is no discussion that each name should be linked to at least one reference specimen with a state of the domain documentation attached to it. It is clear, that creating visual documentation is not anymore a stumbling block, but it seems rather our vision to take this chance.

There is very little discussion that only names should be published unless the related information is online accessible (eg through Zoobank) thus not only delivering what the world wants from us (good for us, that we have such a huge user base that we do not need to build up) but will save us a huge amount of work to retrofit data.

We had a great chance in 1992 (Rio), but our communities and our leaders didn't had a vision to create this global system needed to make a competitive point that biodiversity is relevant but rather continued go build on their minuscule, obviously obsolete fiefdoms.

We should not let slip what Jeff Sachs observes, and end up in the next decade with the above mentioned dismal little attention observed by Gardiner - the vision to build a list of names will not do the job, nor will we get there without additional, so far non-existent support.

* This is a thought regarding an argument David Patterson stated in the Taxaxcom list serve on May 12.

Tja, why is biodiversity lost?

"How ridiculous then that over the last three months, climate change has had 1,382 mentions in British national newspapers.

Yet, during the same period, biodiversity was mentioned just 115 times."

Barry Gardiner (BBC-news, May 7, 2009)

More on the Global Mammal Assesment

Simon Stuart wrote a rebuttal on taxacom and conservation commons listserve, where I tried to reply. So I went back to follow all the links he provides and have to confess, that there are the shape files online available, albeit without any metadata attached to them and as zip files, and of course no primary data they just do not deal with. So I downloaded the elephant shrew data sets and opened it in ArcView to have a look at the shape files. They are very coarse, similar to what we did for our taxonomic works where we drove nice circles. From there I went to the Red List site and looked up the tiger and some of the elephant shrews. At the bottom of the page there was a template how this page would have to be cited. Fair enough.

Now, that I have the famous Mammals of East Africa by Kingdon, I thought, why not look up what he has to say about this species. And here it is: The very same map, with all the collections he checked up marked.



It seems to me odd, that somebody can just copy and paste a figure from a scientific work without citing the source (Kingdon, J. 1974. East African Mammals. An Atlas of Evolution in Africa. Vol. 2A, Academic Press, London. Page 42) and at the same time loosing data, both regarding the distribution and the populations.

Since all the distribution maps of the species pages can be downloaded - and will be downloaded by many people, the proper citation of the materials used should be given. The way it's done all the links to the original work is lost.

An example of total ignorance of Conservation Commons principles: The Global Mammal Assessment.

Four years after the Global Amphibian Assessment (GAA), the Global Mammal Assessment (GMA) hit the news, this time including an impressive number of 1,700 contributing scientists, covering all the mammals of the world. It was one of the few topics that hit the press around the globe during the WCC of an otherwise rather despressive coverage of the WCC, and with it the issues of conservation. This cold be blamed to external factors such as the global financial crisis, but I think, the GMA itself might be symptomatic for the disinterest.

Why? Try to find the GMA on the web. The original Science paper is not an open access paper, and thus for most of the readers off, since you need a credit card to read it. Most of the people in the places where biodiversity disappears don’t have the means to do this. But even, when you get the paper, you can download the auxiliary materials, which refers to the original data, but does not provide access to it. The next step would be to go to IUCN, but their web site does not provide a link to it. So, why not go to SSCs? There is nothing either. A next step is to check out the Redlist web site, where there is finally a press release, but this only covering the mammals on the Red List not the GMA.
Obviously, there is no easy way to get to the anything else than press releases.

When we talked about the GAA in Bangkok four years ago, the management of the GAA stressed, that all the data will be available online. It is not yet.

During the last four years, our technology changed dramatically. One of the most striking change is the availability of remote sensing data allowing access to high resolution remote sensing data to even the most remotest corner of the world. How does the GMA approach to draw simple envelops around the know distribution records or their species live up to this resolution? There are plenty of new programs around that could produce predictive maps, and which are actually used. This approach would actually mean, that the technology is more sophisticated and a little bit more living up to what new data is offering other than essentially experts opinion. It would also allow to challenge the experts, if they would have to provide access to the observation they used to derive their conclusion.

There are well over 100M observation records available through GBIF, data that is not systematically used in the GMA. It can be argued, that there are a lot of problems with that data – but it can at least be criticized or challenged, which is part of the scientific process. Expert’s opinions can not, since their base data is not available. Probably more importantly, such experts’ data can not be used for monitoring purposes, since it is impossible to compare data over time, such as would be needed in Countdown 2010. Finally, how representative is the experts data? How well do they know their species? How has the data been collected that went into their analysis?

Since the begin of the biodiversity crisis in 1986, Redlisting has not changed. It is easier to fly around the world from meeting to meeting, to communicate via email, to use GIS and thus a wider group can be covered. But it all depends on experts – a kind of expert knowledge that can easily be challenged. What should be done is to remove the expert from providing polygons to somebody that provides point data with proper GPS records taken in the field, modeling and GIS experts, and not least an infrastructure allowing others to pick up the data and run an independent analysis. Redlisting should not be the domain of few experts, but should strive to include the widest possible community it needs to live up to this very daunting task to measure the dynamic distribution patterns and changes of our species. It should also provide the community to use the data to make their case in places where one might not expect it. Only the application of the Conservation Commons Principles will allow that.