The Plant List: nice data, shame it's not open

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.

OK, so that makes getting the complete data set a little tedious (there are 620 plant families in the data set), but we can still do it without too much hassle (in fact, I've grabbed the complete data set while writing this blog post). Then I see that the data is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) license. Creative Commons is good, right? In this case, not so much. The CC BY-NC-ND license includes the clause:

You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

So, you can look but not touch. You can't take this data (properly attributed, or course) and build your own list, for example with references linked to DOIs, or to the Biodiversity Heritage Library (which is, of course, exactly what I plan to do). That's a derivative work, and the creators of the Plant List don't want you to do that. Despite this, the Plant List want us to use the data:

Use of the content (such as the classification, synonymised species checklist, and scientific names) for publications and databases by individuals and organizations for not-for-profit usage is encouraged, on condition that full and precise credit is given to The Plant List and the conditions of the Creative Commons Licence are observed.

Great, but you've pretty much killed that by using BY-NC-ND. Then there's this:

If you wish to use the content on a public portal or webpage you are required to contact The Plant List editors at editors@theplantlist.org to request written permission and to ensure that credits are properly made.

Really? The whole point of Creative Commons is that the permissions are explicit in the license. So, actually I don't need your permission to use the data on a public portal, CC BY-NC-ND gives me permission (but with the crippling limitation that I can't make a derivative work).

So, instead of writing a post congratulating the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT) for releasing this data, I'm left spluttering in disbelief that they would hamstring its use through such a poor choice of license. Kew and MOBOT could have made the Plant List available as open data using one of the licenses listed on the Open Definition web site, such as putting the data in the public domain (for example, or using a Creative Commons CC0 license). Instead, they've chosen a restrictive license which makes the data closed, effectively killing the possibility for people to build upon the effort they've put into creating the list. Why do biodiversity data providers seem determined to cling to data for dear life, rather than open it up and let people realise its potential?

On being open: Mendeley and open data versus open source

Paulo Nuin, not the biggest fan of Mendeley wrote a blog post entitled Mendeley is going to be open source, in which he wrote:

After extensively researching some material online, analysing many blog posts and statements made by people linked to Mendeley, checking my sources, I reached the conclusion that soon Mendeley is going to be open source.

Among the essays Paulo read is Jason Hoyt's post on the Mendeley blog: Dear researcher, which side of history will you be on?. In response to a question about open sourcing the Mendeley client, Jason replied:

I get asked a lot about open sourcing Mendeley when I go to speaking events. I always state that we are open to the possibility, but then ask how many people know how to type a URL verus how many know how to program in C++? That’s why we went with the Open API first instead of open sourcing the desktop software. If you can type a URL, which is what the API is based upon, then you can build on top of Mendeley. You don’t need to know how to program.

Despite the fact that open sourcing the desktop client is the second most requested feature for Mendeley, I think Jason is right. I also think Paulo's campaign to make Mendeley open source is misguided. The client doesn't matter. OK, yes, it's probably the reason most people use Mendeley, but there are lots of competing clients (EndNote, Zotero, Papers, etc.), and there are several bibliographic data formats (RIS, EndNote XML, BibTeX) and essentially one document format (PDF) that they support, so individual users don't have to worry about locking their individual bibliographies into a proprietary format. Couple this with the existence of an API (albeit a pretty crap one), and whether an individual software client is closed or open source doesn't matter much.

Will the data be open?

However, what makes Mendeley different is the aggregation of bibliographic data (35 million references and counting).

I'd argue it's the fate of this aggregation that matters. In a comment on the Guardian's piece Mendeley 'most likely to change the world for the better', Jane Good wrote:

"World-changing potential"? This utopian fantasy stuff is a little much, no? After all, we're talking about a for-profit corporation using closed-source software to monitor private usage habits for monetary gain. And how exactly is this company meant to sustain its millions of dollars of annual burn on a few measly storage subscriptions? At some point the data will have to go up for sale to the highest bidder, plain and simple. The API, as it exists now, does not provide access to that data, and it probably never will, right, DrGinn[sic]?

Toning down the rhetoric, the question is Mendeley, Scopus, Talis – will you be making your data Open?:

But how can a company create an income stream from Open Scientific content? That’s the a question for me for this decade. If we can solve it we can transform the world. If however the linked Open data are all going to be through paywalls, portals, query engines then we regress into the feudal information possession of the past. I hope the companies present in this session can help solve this. It won’t be easy but it has to be done. So I now ask Mendeley, Elsevier/Scopus, Talis: Are your data Openly available for re-use?

For me the question of whether the source code for the Mendeley desktop will be made open source is a red herring, and ultimately a distraction from the real question — will the data be open?