The authors highlight that the effects of open access are stronger for publications within the natural science. The explanation is that in our field, compared to physics or social sciences, it is rare that one can get preprints through freely accessible databases maintained for that specific purpose. From my own experience with the publishing dynamics in biology,  I was very surprised to see how many preprints in topics related to philosophy of biology one can get from PhilPapers, an online database for philosophy that just went public on January 28, 2009! Let me stress the word preprint here. In the narrow field of ant taxonomy it almost never happens that authors submit their papers to antbase.org for example, a database created for that purpose, even after they have been published.

But the main point of this paper is that the influence of open access was also stronger in the developing world, where individual scientists may struggle to get access to relevant publications through their funding strap host institutions. This result puts more sound into the argument that Donat Agosti, creator of antbase.org, has been putting forward- biodiversity is greatest in the developing Southern Hemisphere and we will all benefit the most from facilitating local conservation related science by making the necessary data available without restrictions. Keeping access to taxonomic descriptions restricted is akin to imposing a copyright on species².

Now, you won’t be able to read the full article unless you have a subscription to Science which is, I think, a delicious irony.

References

Us working with ants just love to have plenty of databases and digital content available at a click of a button to assist in our malevolent plan to turn these vicious little creatures against humanity.

From Laurent Keller’s laboratory in Switzerland now comes Fourmidable, a web-accessible database for all things related to ant genomics. It is aimed primary at molecular data generated from research into the genetics of social behavior. It currently contains genomic data on two model species, the fire ant Solenopsis invicta and the black garden ant Lasius niger, but it hopes to become a central repository for the curation and management of data from any ant species.

A detailed description of the project has just been published in the open access journal BMC Genomics.