Names of plant species are a foundation for further research on the ecology and evolution of plant diversity. Open access to biodiversity information facilitates the downstream use of data for applied purposes such as macroecology [@cai_global_2022; @sabatini_global_2022], conservation, plant breeding and phylogenetics. Naming of new taxa is an essential service, enabling us to interact with existing bodies of knowledge - as Linneaus warned: "nomina si nescis, perit et cognitio rurem" (if you do not know the names, your knowledge gets lost) [@linnaeus_philosophica_1792]. Accurate naming is also essential to develop our understanding of newly described organisms. We cannot protect what we have not named; legislative protection of species cannot proceed without a formal species description.
Despite the importance of naming, and the many uses of a comprehensive taxonomic system, progress towards documenting and understanding plant diversity is challenged by the so-called “taxonomic impediment”. This term was first introduced in 1976 and is a shorthand for the skills (and resources) gap in taxonomy [@taylor_submission_1976; @taylor_descriptive_1983]. Access to these necessary skills and resources is uneven, and when viewed globally actually mismatches the areas of greatest need; the most species-rich areas are often the most resource-poor [@meyer_multidimensional_2016].
The naming of algae, fungi, and plants is governed by the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (hereafter the Code) [@turland_international_2018], which is revised every six years at an International Botanical Congress following proposals put forward by the botanical community [@knapp_stability_2004; @lindon_international_2020]. The Code has specific rules for publication of specific nomenclatural acts; unless these rules are followed (see Chapter IV and V of @turland_international_2018) names are not considered code compliant and are not correctly available for use. Nomenclatural acts referring to names of taxa include names of new taxa and renaming of taxa (such as transfers to different genera or the establishment of a replacement name). Because nomenclatural acts must be published, they should be widely available for use by both taxonomic and downstream communities.
Names of taxa are associated with type materials; these are objects (often specimens) to which a name is attached and which serve as a reference for future taxonomists. The type method is a relatively recent innovation; prior to 1958 the citation of a type as necessary for the publication of a nomenclatural act as defined above was not required (Art. 40, [@turland_international_2018]). The adoption of the type method in plant taxonomy means that there is an intimate connection between the names of plants and their type specimens in collections. The distribution of these preserved specimens has been influenced by colonial history, with comprehensive plant collections having been developed in the Global North, and just under 70% of the almost 400 million herbarium specimens being housed in Europe and North America whilst the areas richest in species diversity are often located in the tropics [@paton_plant_2020; @thiers_worlds_2022]. Indeed, the enormous wealth of existing collections means that many as yet unnamed taxa are already lodged in preserved collections, awaiting examination and description [@bebber_herbaria_2010].
Patterns of colonialism mean that the specimens associated with the naming of new taxa - the types - are often not held in the country or even continent of origin [@das_2018_nature; @park_colonial_2021]. The pattern of type deposition, however, has not been assessed on a global scale. Various global initiatives (e.g., the Mellon Foundation’s Global Plants Initiative) have sought to redress this imbalance through digital access. The adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the associated Nagoya Protocol and related national legislation (The Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing) mandates sharing of the benefits arising from access to biodiversity. As a result, countries encourage and can legislate deposition of specimens collected within national boundaries in national herbaria [@paknia_lack_2015]. The degree to which these international instruments, now ratified by most countries, have changed in post-colonial practice is not well-documented.
Increasingly, digitisation is providing free open access to these specimens [@soltis_digitization_2017] and broadening their scientific use [@james_herbarium_2018; @lendemer_extended_2019]. However, it is necessary to build human and infrastructural capacity to properly document plant diversity in order to prioritise conservation action [@fazey_who_2005; @cheek_new_2020]. Recent work by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility’s Biodiversity Information for Development initiative (see GBIF BID impact summary) has shown that by targeting underrepresented regions in digitisation efforts, numbers of threatened taxa available in globally accessed datasets can be significantly increased.
Although it could be argued that the taxonomic impediment is in part due to the shortage of taxonomists [@engel_taxonomic_2021], open access to information is also critical as it facilitates the training of researchers, the circumscription and recircumscription of taxa and provides the basis for further downstream analyses. Approximately two thousand vascular plant species are described as new to science each year [@nicolson_impact_2017], and most of them are likely to have narrow distributions and to be threatened with extinction [@niclughadha_extinction_2020] or have uses as yet undiscovered by plant scientists and others. In addition to new taxa, taxonomists work to understand and document relationships of plants, leading to name changes and recircumscriptions of taxa, in turn leading to new names.
Electronic publication of nomenclatural acts was, until 1st January 2012, not permitted under the code. Before that date all nomenclatural acts for algae, fungi, and plants had to be published in print on paper. The adoption of electronic publication by the community (at the Melbourne International Botanical Congress, see [@nicolson_impact_2017]) led to an increase in this method of publication, but did not substantially change patterns of taxonomic activity. During discussions over electronic publication leading up to and at the Melbourne Congress, there was conflation of electronic publication with Open Access publication [@knapp_changes_2011; @flann_report_2014]. This conflation led some to suggest that this change in the rules would be a watershed for access to information about the names of organisms, but this was not the case [@nicolson_impact_2017] - publication by electronic means and Open Access are very different things.
Copyright is another term often confounded with access in discussions of publications of all types. Copyright is the right to determine how creative works are used, distributed and displayed and, unless transferred, this right is owned by the creator of the work. Others are not permitted to take these rights without the owner's consent. The Open Access movement provides a means by which copyright holders can simply state that they want their creative work to be open to all, which they do by providing an open licence. Good examples of this are the licences of the Creative Commons organisation.
The Open Access movement champions free and open access to all information. A foundational event of the Open Access movement was the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)[@chan_budapest_2002]. It was recognised in the initiative that scholarly publications were an important and public good, that, with the advent of the internet, could be shared completely freely to all those who wanted to read it, whether out of need or curiosity. By removing barriers to scientific literature it was hoped that open access would “… accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge” [@chan_budapest_2002]. The Initiative recommended two complementary strategies to achieve these goals, firstly self-archiving in open repositories (so-called green open access) and publication in completely open access journals (so-called gold open access), usually associated with an article processing charge to the author. Subsequently other shades of open access publication have emerged that are detailed in table @tbl:id.
| Type | Description | Who pays | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Closed | Not available to read without paying for access | Reader | Systematic Botany |
| OA - Green | Self-archiving in open repositories | Mixed | Zenodo (repository) |
| OA - Gold | Completely open access journals | Author | PhytoKeys |
| OA - Bronze | Freely available to read, but does not have an open access licence | Publisher | Phytoneuron |
| OA - Hybrid | An article processing charge to publish openly in an otherwise closed journal | Author or publisher | Taxon |
| OA - Diamond | Openly licensed, but neither the author nor the reader pays charges | Publisher | European Journal of Taxonomy |
| Table: Types of open access (OA) described, with indication of who bears the costs and examples of publications or archives used in botanical nomenclature. {#tbl:id tag="T.1"} |
Here we explore patterns in publication of the names of vascular plants using publication data from the International Plant Names Index (IPNI), along with data from global specimen data aggregators coupled with taxonomy and distribution from the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP). We examine the degree and global distribution of Open Access publication of these important data to answer three research questions (1) how has open access publishing been adopted in the publication of names, (2) does open access availability vary with the distribution of the taxon and (3) does the location of the data provider responsible for mobilisation of digitised type specimen metadata correlate with the natural range of the taxon. We make recommendations we feel will help better support work to document and conserve plant diversity for downstream use and suggest next steps for research and improvement of the data sets that we used.