Conservation Commons

I heard a seminar today by Tom Moritz, who is a librarian who has been at the American Museum of Natural History and prior to that the California Academy of Science and has just taken up a position at the Getty Research Institute. Tom is a great proponent of the Conservation Commons, the purpose of which “is to ensure open access and fair use of data, information, knowledge, and expertise on the conservation of biodiversity for the benefit of the global conservation community and beyond.” The idea of the Conservation Commons has grown out of the Creative Commons movement, the idea of the latter being to give creators a spectrum of possibilities to license their work between full copyright and the public domain, “a some rights reserved” notion of copyright. There have been many endorsers of the Conservation Commons to date, but the idea of open access to data is still a difficult one for a lot of folks to work with.