Convention on Biological Diversity

Powerful PCs, the Internet, data exchange protocols, and more recently a cultural change among biodiversity scientists are rapidly developing into a huge international framework of biodiversity data. For example, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is now providing access to well over 45 million specimen records based at over 100 institutions world wide. Analyses derived from biodiversity databases, collating data from literally all around the world, are now becoming integrated into the political decision-making processes at all levels in such places as Mexico and Madagascar. At the same time, an increasing number of scientific journals are being disseminated both in paper as well as in electronic form over the Internet. However, there is one serious problem: copyright. Information on ants might serve as a good example. They are one of still few groups of organisms for which a complete, continually updated list of all the currently known 11826 species exists, a fast increasing access to high resolution type and other specimen imagery (e.g. antweb.org), and for which almost all the non-copyrighted articles, including the descriptions of new species, are online accessible, linked to by either the citations in the database, or the entire publications. This includes some 3,800 publications or an estimate