iPhylo: Patenting biodiversity tools

Software patents are a real pain!
Especially when claimed by members of a research community. I was quite shocked when I read Rod Page's post Patenting biodiversity tools .
Even worse to see that the same organizations - like uBio, which I was a big fan of - which make massive use of freely available information do apply for software patents!

By claiming a software patent they reserve the rights to prohibit others to use the same methods to handle biodiversity data and the uBio patent goes pretty far...

Biodiversity informatics is not the research area to earn the big money. So in this particular research context do we have to assume such patents aim to hinder scientific progress? Or what else can be the intention of such patents?

Sponge Bob is not related to humans

Pre-Cambrian life is a truly fascinating subject. A recent study looked at the genetic evolution of 128 genes of 55 species to determine the order of early branching of taxa (sponge groups, ctenophores, placozoans, cnidarians, and bilaterians). One of the questions asked was whether the nervous system evolved once or twice in the course of early evolution. The study also sheds some light on the nature of sponges, a taxon that had already fascinated Charles Darwin at the beginning of his career.

"Phylogenomics revives traditional views on deep animal relationships";
Hervé Philippe Romain Derelle, Philippe Lopez, Kerstin Pick, Carole Borchiellini, Nicole Boury-Esnault, Jean Vacalet, Emmanuelle Renard, Evelyn Houliston, Eric Quéinnec, Corinne Da Silva, Patrick Wincker, Hervé Le Guyader, Sally Leys, Daniel J. Jackson, Fabian Schreiber, Dirk Erpenbeck, Burkhard Morgenstern, Gert Wörheide und Michaël Manuel;
Current Biology online 2. April 2009;
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.02.052

See also: Deep Phylogeny Project

A preprint archive for the geosciences

Today two interesting blog posts about getting hold of geoscientific papers have been published: The Open Source Paleontologist lists several ways to find and retrieve pdfs on your own. Dave Hone picks this up and complains a bit about those people who are too lazy to use these resources but are asking copies directly from the authors-thus causing extra work.

Surely, there are a variety of possibilities to find relevant literature on the web. But the majority of geoscientific papers are still published in commercial, closed access journals. So even if you found your artcle on Google Scholar, you'll frequently end on a page asking you for your credit card, unless you work for an institution which can afford the necessary licenses or it was publishe in an Open Access journal.

Open Access is a fine thing and many interesting papers already appear in open access journals such as PLOS. The idea certainly will become even more popular in the future. But in my opinion it is unrealistic to assume that researchers will favor open access journals for their top results when they have the chance to get their 'Nature paper'.
Other disciplines have reacted on this dilemma and provide and maintain so called preprint archives such as Arxiv. A preprint is a draft of a scientific paper that has not yet been published in a scientific journal. Preprint archives enable authors to quickly circulate their results and most important: copies of archived preprints are freely available!

Unfortunately, there is no dedicated geoscientific preprint archive :(( You can find geoscientific preprints in some institutional repositories and postprints on some homepages etc.., but there is no common access point.

But it should be there! Could a geo preprint archive be a community effort? Of cource it had to include the community, but could a community driven archive work?
Alternatively, libraries could take on that responsibility. So... geolibrarians could you hear me? Give us a working geo preprint archive, ..please.. (maybe you could call it Geoxiv;) ).
Sure, motivating the geo community to contribute will not be an easy job, but maybe one just has to start?