Der geplante Lichtbildschutz Artikel (Art 2 Abs. 3bis) behindert Forschung und IT-Industrie

Am kommenden Montag (21.1.2019)  berät die Kommission for Wissenschaft, Bildung und Kultur (WBK) des schweizerischen Ständerates die Revision des Urheberrechtsgesetzes. Nach dem jetzigen Revisionsentwurf sollen in Zukunft...[more]

Training for building and reusing your corpus of mineable taxonomic literature

The taxonomic literature is a rich, high quality, and largely untapped source of biodiversity knowledge. Taxonomy helps us recognize species and map their distributions through text descriptions, images, and records of when and...[more]

Why do we need BLR to store scholarly taxonomic articles?

When Jérôme Constant published yesterday his taxonomic article on eurybrachid planthopper insects in the European Journal of Taxonomy, its data became immediately accessible as FAIR and open access data in...[more]

Schnappschüsse und das Urheberrecht (Snapshots and copyright law)

The Thursday November 29, 2018 (doi) issue of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung includes a “Gastkommentar” by me (Donat Agosti) arguing that the proposed insertion of an article protecting any kind of photographs of three...[more]

Provenance: another look at taxonomic treatments and names

When an "ex banker" - Tim Robertson -  meets an "ex taxonomist" - Donat Agosti - this can be very inspiring, especially when they discover that they share rather unexpectedly more than they ever expected....[more]

Zookeys 10th anniversary

Happy Birthday Zookeys, and congratulations to Pensoft, its innovator and publisher.

Today’s 10th anniversary of Zookeys is a great day for biodiversity. The discoveries reported in the press release and celebrated in the...[more]

Plazi and BLR receive €1.1 million from Arcadia Fund to open up new biodiversity data

Plazi has received a grant of EUR 1.1 million from Arcadia – the charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin – to liberate data, such as taxonomic treatments and images, trapped in scholarly biodiversity...[more]