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Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) allow observation and reporting of global biodiversity change, but a detailed framework for the empirical derivation of specific EBVs has yet to be developed. Here, we re-examine and refine the previous candidate set of species traits EBVs and show how traits related to phenology, morphology, reproduction, physiology and movement can contribute to EBV operationalization. The selected EBVs express intra-specific trait variation and allow monitoring of how organisms respond to global change. We evaluate the societal relevance of species traits EBVs for policy targets and demonstrate how open, interoperable and machine-readable trait data enable the building of EBV data products. We outline collection methods, meta(data) standardization, reproducible workflows, semantic tools and licence requirements for producing species traits EBVs. An operationalization is critical for assessing progress towards biodiversity conservation and sustainable development goals and has wide implications for data-intensive science in ecology, biogeography, conservation and Earth observation. Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) are intended to provide standardized measurements for reporting biodiversity change. Here, the authors outline the conceptual and empirical basis for the use of EBVs based on species traits, and highlight tools necessary for creating comprehensive EBV data products.

Background A large part of our knowledge on the world's species is recorded in the corpus of biodiversity literature with well over hundred million pages, and is represented in natural history collections estimated at 2 – 3 billion specimens. But this body of knowledge is almost entirely in paper-print form and is not directly accessible through the Internet. For the digitization of this literature, new territories have to be chartered in the fields of technical, legal and social issues that presently impede its advance. The taxonomic literature seems especially destined for such a transformation. Discussion Plazi was founded as an association with the primary goal of transforming both the printed and, more recently, \"born-digital\" taxonomic literature into semantically enabled, enhanced documents. This includes the creation of a test body of literature, an XML schema modeling its logic content (TaxonX), the development of a mark-up editor (GoldenGATE) allowing also the enhancement of documents with links to external resources via Life Science Identifiers (LSID), a repository for publications and issuance of bibliographic identifiers, a dedicated server to serve the marked up content (the Plazi Search and Retrieval Server, SRS) and semantic tools to mine information. Plazi's workflow is designed to respect copyright protection and achieves extraction by observing exceptions and limitations existent in international copyright law. Conclusion The information found in Plazi's databases – taxonomic treatments as well as the metadata of the publications – are in the public domain and can therefore be used for further scientific research without any restriction, whether or not contained in copyrighted publications.

The EU and other states have made legislative efforts to clarify data mining in copyrightable works, but the situation remains obscure and confusing, especially in a globalised field where international legislation can contribute to opacity. The present paper aims at asserting a common position of three communities representing biodiversity sciences and data specialists on this issue and to propose common and best practice guidelines so that they become universally accepted rules. As scientific data users, we take the standpoint that scientific data are not copyrightable and, furthermore, they can be accessed, shared and reused freely. Thus, once legal access has been gained to copyrighted publications, the data within those scholarly publications can be considered to be open data that is freely extractable. This set of recommendations has been reached specifically for scientific use and societal benefits.

Background. The 7(th) Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development is helping the European Union to prepare for an integrative system for intelligent management of biodiversity knowledge. The infrastructure that is envisaged and that will be further developed within the Programme \"Horizon 2020\" aims to provide open and free access to taxonomic information to anyone with a requirement for biodiversity data, without the need for individual consent of other persons or institutions. Open and free access to information will foster the re-use and improve the quality of data, will accelerate research, and will promote new types of research. Progress towards the goal of free and open access to content is hampered by numerous technical, economic, sociological, legal, and other factors. The present article addresses barriers to the open exchange of biodiversity knowledge that arise from European laws, in particular European legislation on copyright and database protection rights. We present a legal point of view as to what will be needed to bring distributed information together and facilitate its re-use by data mining, integration into semantic knowledge systems, and similar techniques. We address exceptions and limitations of copyright or database protection within Europe, and we point to the importance of data use agreements. We illustrate how exceptions and limitations have been transformed into national legislations within some European states to create inconsistencies that impede access to biodiversity information. Conclusions. The legal situation within the EU is unsatisfactory because there are inconsistencies among states that hamper the deployment of an open biodiversity knowledge management system. Scientists within the EU who work with copyright protected works or with protected databases have to be aware of regulations that vary from country to country. This is a major stumbling block to international collaboration and is an impediment to the open exchange of biodiversity knowledge. Such differences should be removed by unifying exceptions and limitations for research purposes in a binding, Europe-wide regulation.

Taxonomy is the discipline responsible for charting the world’s organismic diversity, understanding ancestor/descendant relationships, and organizing all species according to a unified taxonomic classification system. Taxonomists document the attributes (characters) of organisms, with emphasis on those can be used to distinguish species from each other. Character information is compiled in the scientific literature as text, tables, and images. The information is presented according to conventions that vary among taxonomic domains; such conventions facilitate comparison among similar species, even when descriptions are published by different authors. There is considerable uncertainty within the taxonomic community as to how to re-use images that were included in taxonomic publications, especially in regard to whether copyright applies. This article deals with the principles and application of copyright law, database protection, and protection against unfair competition, as applied to images. We conclude that copyright does not apply to most images in taxonomic literature because they are presented in a standardized way and lack the individuality that is required to qualify as ‘copyrightable works’. There are exceptions, such as wildlife photographs, drawings and artwork produced in a distinctive individual form and intended for other than comparative purposes (such as visual art). Further exceptions may apply to collections of images that qualify as a database in the sense of European database protection law. In a few European countries, there is legal protection for photographs that do not qualify as works in the usual sense of copyright. It follows that most images found in taxonomic literature can be re-used for research or many other purposes without seeking permission, regardless of any copyright declaration. In observance of ethical and scholarly standards, re-users are expected to cite the author and original source of any image that they use.

Scientific publications provide a wealth of peer-reviewed, high-quality data that have been maintained over time, resulting in data persistence. As data repositories with rich provenance information, publications are indispensable sources for the integration and extension of networks of interlinked Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR*1) bio/geodiversity data. In this way, they form pivotal fact- and knowledge-based contributions to applications that address the biodiversity crisis. The mobilization of data preserved in scientific publications is hindered, however, by distinct copyright legislation contexts for publications versus the data that they contain. Moreover, legislations concerning copyright continue to lack harmonization across jurisdictions, their interpretation is difficult, and the applicable legal national scope can be uncertain. We clarify and highlight that data within scientific publications are not copyrightable and thus can be openly and freely reused once legal access has been gained to their enclosing publication*2. To ensure that publications are as accessible as possible, a joint statement supported by the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) and the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) (Benichou et al. 2023) recommends that authors and publishers make their works as accessible as possible by using a CC-BY license or preferably waive copyright (CC0) to their publications. Explicitly associating a public domain mark (PDM, e.g., the PDM from Creative Commons) to their published data, provides users with certainty about reusability. Yet, by setting works and bio/geodiversity data into the public domain, they do not become a free-for-all. We stress that data need to be associated with clear provenance information in alignment with scientific best practices and the scientific community's social norms. This includes providing detailed attribution to authors of cited works and reused data. Proposed data governance labels, for example, modeled after the Local Contexts labels developed by the international Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLC) community, would enable authors to communicate social and ethical contexts and applicable rules to data users for ensuring the sustainability of a shared environmental and data commons. Categories of Local Contexts labels that are of interest and applicable in the sciences are, for example, those that communicate (1) correct citation information and ask for attribution when knowledge and/or data are reused (Traditional Knowledge label (TK) Attribution), (2) an interest in being recognized and acknowledged due to a significant relationship with and responsibility for samples and data (Biocultural label (BC) Provenance), (3) the verification of the data and their context following a community protocol (TK Verified), (4) that non-commercial use (TK Non-Commercial/BC Non-Commercial) or (5) outreach activities (TK Outreach/BC Outreach) are generally permitted, while for other uses direct contact and engagement is required, or (6) an openness to collaboration and partnerships (TK Collaboration/BC Collaboration). There are concerns about the tension between the goal of achieving open data (e.g., Anonymous 2014) to enable and promote open science (e.g., UNESCO 2021) and, at the same time, imposing restrictions on these data in the form of governance labels. Furthermore, while the reference of the publication through which data are published, as well as more specifically bibliographic references cited for specific data within the publication, provide sufficient information for attribution and provenance, much more fine-grained and nuanced contextual information (e.g., in the form of metadata) is needed for assuring responsible reuse. Such context-providing metadata unlock the full potential of the data and enable their reusability. This can be done using machine-actionable markup tags in combination with human-readable labels that inform machines and human users about the semantics of the data as well as their ethical and social dimensions that govern responsible and sustainable reuse. Future work is needed to discover, differentiate and define the quality and scope of the appropriate contexts that are necessary and sufficient for being able to fully and responsibly reuse the data in different situations.

The Swiss NGO Plazi (http://plazi.org) has developed an automated workflow for liberating data, including images and text, from new taxonomic publications issued in PDF format. This stepwise process extracts, article metadata, illustrations and their captions, bibliographic references, scientific names, named geographic entities such as coordinates and country names, collection codes, and finally, taxonomic treatments. These extracted data are enhanced and published in TreatmentBank (http://plazi.org) and deposited in Biodiversity Literature Repository (https:/biolitrepo.org) respectively, in which a Digital Object Identifier (DataCite DOI) is minted for articles as well as their contained figures and taxon treatments, each linked to each other in their metadata. This input is complemented by the import of Journal Article Tag Suite/Taxpub XML based publications from Pensoft publishers (e.g. Zookeys, Journal of Hymenoptera Research; https://pensoft.net/browse_journals) that are semantically enhanced during their journal production workflow. Upon import, materials citation are discovered and parsed, and the taxonomic treatments added to TreatmentBank where a persistent identifier is minted. From TreatmentBank data from taxonomic treatments, including occurence data from cited specimens, are submitted to GBIF (http://gbif.org), or are accessible via API. Treatments and material citations from more than 26,200 articles have been registered. The articles can be found on GBIF using the Digital Object Identifier in the search field. Plazi, together with Pensoft Publishers, has processed over 26,000 articles containing more than 284,000 taxonomic treatments, 190,000 images, 50,000 georeferenced materials citations, together comprising an estimated 100 million facts. Through the support of the Arcadia Fund (https://www.arcadiafund.org.uk/) Plazi's processing is expanding to cover a sufficient number of journals to liberate the data of over 50% of the new described animal species annually. This will complement an existing service provided to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, to convert the European Journal of Taxonomy and their other journals (http://sciencepress.mnhn.fr/en/periodiques/adansonia/40/1) to JATS/TaxPub (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK47081), as well as an increasing portfolio of journals published in JATS/TaxPub by Pensoft Ltd.

Background As biological disciplines extend into the ‘big data’ world, they will need a names-based infrastructure to index and interconnect distributed data. The infrastructure must have access to all names of all organisms if it is to manage all information. Those who compile lists of species hold different views as to the intellectual property rights that apply to the lists. This creates uncertainty that impedes the development of a much-needed infrastructure for sharing biological data in the digital world. Findings The laws in the United States of America and European Union are consistent with the position that scientific names of organisms and their compilation in checklists, classifications or taxonomic revisions are not subject to copyright. Compilations of names, such as classifications or checklists, are not creative in the sense of copyright law. Many content providers desire credit for their efforts. Conclusions A ‘blue list’ identifies elements of checklists, classifications and monographs to which intellectual property rights do not apply. To promote sharing, authors of taxonomic content, compilers, intermediaries, and aggregators should receive citable recognition for their contributions, with the greatest recognition being given to the originating authors. Mechanisms for achieving this are discussed.

Scholarly publications in taxonomy are used as the sole carrier of the communication channel to publicize the description of new species, more generally any kind of taxon, their augmentations in form of re-descriptions to small notes such as additional observation records, or deprecations when the name of a taxon is changing. This is communicated in a highly standardized way. For nomenclatural issues, the Codes (e.g. International Code of Zoological Nomenclature) require certain elements, and for comparative reasons, highly formalized language, document structure, illustrations and citation systems are used. This estimated corpus of 500M printed pages includes all we know about the biodiversity in the sciences as well as what has been processed in terms of specimens in the natural history collections. This includes tens of millions of scientific illustrations, taxonomic treatments, i.e. parts of articles that are clearly delimited and headed by a label including a taxonomic name, materials citation, citations of articles and treatments, specimens by their specimen codes, collections by their collection codes, and collectors by their name. Implicitly, the entire catalogue of life is waiting to be liberated. Only recently, with the advent of text and data mining and of publishing, a change is taking place to make all this data after publishing immediately widely accessible and digitally accessible knowledge in terms of findability, accessibility, interoperability and reuse (FAIR). The Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR) is a community in Zenodo, the open science repository at CERN and part of the European project OpenAIRE. Its goal is to provide a long-term, stable, open access repository for the long tail, preferably FAIR research data. Together with Plazi (http://plazi.org)and Pensoft, BLR has been created to allow deposition of taxonomic articles enhanced with links to data extracted from therein and deposited in BLR, such as illustrations or taxonomic treatments. The metadata for these deposits is enriched with extensive links to cited sources, or the source article. For each of the deposits, a DataCite DOI is minted, unless one exists already. The deposits can be found using either the search functionality of Zenodo, or the BLR website, which makes use of the millions of facts extracted from the publications via the Plazi workflow. A prime user of the BLR data is GBIF which is using the taxonomic treatments and the figures in their respective view of the taxonomic articles. The input of new taxa allows updating the GBIF taxonomic backbone almost instantaneously and keeping it up-to-date with publishing of new taxa or synonymies. Currently, 35,600 articles, and 190,000 images are available, with an expected 300,000 taxonomic treatments by Fall 2019 and almost 30% of the annually new described species are accessible online, both in human and machine readable format. With the support of the Arcadia Fund, the goal is to provide access to over 50% of the annually described new species, from the necessary number of taxonomic journals, over 600,000 taxonomic treatments and 350,000 illustrations by 2021, hopefully with an increasing community adding to this new resource as author, publisher, or data liberator.