A Treasure Trove of Open Access and Creative Commons Resources for Biodiversity Researchers

November 2, 2016July 1, 2022 Mona

The Trove

Are you a biodiversity researcher or project manager working on a technical proposal, research paper, project website, team report or newsletter? Whatever medium of communication you’re using, having the right resources to perform tasks such as, researching journals, finding images and documentary videos, compiling biodiversity data and developing checklists, can save you a lot of pain, time and most importantly, budget. Thanks to the birth of open access and creative commons resources in the scientific community. It gave all of us the ability to use high quality references and boosted our productivity.

The internet as a free channel of distribution

The internet has provided an enormous gateway of distribution of these resources. Thanks to those initiatives that believe that access to scientific journals, biodiversity datasets and other online biodiversity resources must be made available to the public without any charge. We can exercise with full appreciation of our freedom of information even more by acknowledging those who have done the work for the open access materials we use. Considering that some authors had to pay publishing fees to bring their research out to open access journals. But as readers, their published work is freely available to us without subscription fees. We can give our thanks by crediting proper citations to these authors and sources of original information.

This article aims to create a listing of some of the available sources of information and materials that can be useful to any biodiversity research and projects. If you would like to suggest more resources that’s probably not included in the list, feel free to click on the “Contact Us” button on the right side of the page.

First, here are some introduction to understand the concepts of Open Access and Creative Commons: