22 September 2003

Ants and Open Access

Ants have impressed biologists for years by their remarkable capacity to carry loads many times their own weight. Now ants have taken on a larger burden than usual - traditional academic publishers.

There are 11,500 known species of ant worldwide, all of which are cataloged at Antbase. This portal is centered on a complete, continually updated, list of all the species that have ever been described (and their synonyms). Antbase supports conservation efforts, providing links to other ongoing projects of regional scope, such as AntWeb which focuses on ants in California and Madagascar, and major collections of digital images of ants. It also feeds its information into global initiatives such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, aiming to provide a global one-stop service for biodiversity information.

Open Access is critical to the success of biodiversity database projects such as Antbase. An initial goal of Antbase is to make the entire published record of ant systematics openly accessible online, including around 3,800 printed publications (over 80,000 pages). Copyright restrictions imposed by publishers limit the number of publications that can be included, however. Also, most of the articles that are available take the form of PDFs scanned in from a print publication. These 'article images' lack the searchability and reusability of structured XML. The team behind Antbase would ultimately like to build a database that incorporates descriptions of all species, in a standardized, structured XML form, but this will require a major shift in the policy of publishers.

The field of ant taxonomy is enjoying something of a renaissance, with over 130 current contributors to Antbase. Although most ant researchers agree on the importance of making taxonomic descriptions openly accessible online, the projects have come into conflict with the commercial publishers who print taxonomy monographs, large volumes that contain important information about new ant species. The publishers oblige authors to sign contracts restricting the online publication of taxonomy data, as they fear that web publishing will reduce sales of the costly monographs. For example, Brian Fisher, an entomologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco who led the team that developed AntWeb, is trying to get permission from Harvard University Press to publish his data on the ants of Madagascar online prior to their publication of his monograph.

Donat Agosti, from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is an outspoken critic of the publishers' restrictive policies. "They raise serious issues about an academic publisher's obligations to make biodiversity data freely available for non-commercial research, education and conservation," says Agosti. "It also makes the taxpayer pay twice for research, first to produce the results, and second to have access to them." He has called for greater collaboration and data-sharing standards.

"The inaccessibility of published records frustrates efforts to compile lists of the world's living species, and to develop the next generation of tools and data repositories," says Agosti. "This information is critical for biodiversity monitoring and future conservation projects, and to attract the critical mass of young talented students."

www.antbase.org
www.antweb.org