In my last post I discussed why I thought the decision of The Plant List to use a restrictive license (CC-BY-NC-ND) was such a poor choice. CC-BY-NC-ND states that To make this point more concrete, I've created this site: Experiments with The Plant List to show the kinds of things that The Plant List's choice of license prevents the taxonomic community from doing.

The Plant List (http://www.theplantlist.org/) has been released today, complete with glowing press releases. The list includes some 1,040,426 names. I eagerly looked for the Download button, but none is to be found. You can grab download individual search results (say, at family level), but not the whole data set.

I had the great pleasure and privilege of announcing the launch of the Panton Principles at the Science Commons Symposium – Pacific Northwest on Saturday. The launch of the Panton Principles, many months after they were first suggested is really largely down to the work of Jonathan Gray.

Communia published its Public Domain Manifesto . The manifesto identifies the public domain concept with respect to historical development and more urgently, its relevance to culture today. I think it makes an important statement, in terms of offering a level, common understanding that could be used widely across society, government, and business.

There has been some debate going backwards and forwards over the past few weeks about licensing, peoples expectations, and the extent to which researchers can be expected to understand, or want to understand, the details of legal terms, licensing and other technical minutiae. It is reasonable for scientific researchers not to wish to get into the details.

Last night BBC One aired David Attenborough's Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, which featured a lovely "fly through" the tree of life: In conjunction with the TV show, the Wellcome Trust has launched the Interactive Tree of Life, a Flash-based view of the tree of life. There's also a blog about the project. Here's a demo of the tree: The tree looks very nice, and a lot of work has gone into it, but I am somewhat underwhelmed.

The Science Commons has released a short video by Jesse Dylan, who made the Yes We Can video.

So while on the train yesterday in somewhat pre-caffeinated state I stuck my foot in it somewhat. Several others have written (Nils Reinton, Bill Hooker, Jon Eisen, Hsien-Hsien Lei, Shirley Wu) on the unattributed use of an image that was put together by Ricardo Vidal for the DNA Network of blogs. The company that did this are selling hokum. No question of that.

The A Shared Culture video from the Creative Commons web site.

Science commons and other are organising a workshop on Open Science issues as a satellite meeting of the European Science Open Forum meeting in July.