Copyright does not apply to taxonomic data - Plaxi approach

[AshLin]

The Plaxi group is a Swiss based international non-profit association
supporting and promoting the development of persistent and openly
accessible digital bio-taxonomic literature. It extracts specific
taxonomic information akin to that which any author may do while
citing or reporting another scientific publication. This information
belongs to the public domain and is extracted and placed in such a
manner by Plaxi. This has wide ramifications to the freedom of flow of
information.

Third world countries often complain to lack of free access to
taxonomic information regarding their own biodiversity which has been
utilised for taxonomic and scientific research by first world
scientists. This will help mitigate that problem in a small way.

The following paper freely downloadable online (http://plazi.org:8080/
dspace/handle/10199/19092) expolains the philosophy -

* Agosti D, Egloff W (2009). "Taxonomic information exchange and
copyright: the Plazi approach". BMC Research Notes 2:53. doi:
10.1186/1756-0500-2-53

See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plazi

and

http://plazi.org/.

Ashwin Baindur

to learn more.