I've put off writing this post about the Bouchout Declaration for a number of reasons. I attended the meeting that launched the declaration last year, and from my perspective that was a frustrating meeting.

Just noticed that BioStor now has just over 70,000 articles extracted from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. This number is a little "soft" as there are some duplicates in the database that I need to clean out, but it's a nice sounding number. Each article has full text available, and in most cases reasonably complete metadata.

Here is my presentation from today's Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond meeting.

Each year the grandly titled International Institute for Species Exploration (IISE) publishes list of the top 10 species described in the previous year.

The open access taxonomic journal ZooKeys has published a special issue with four papers, each available in HTML, PDF, and XML, the later being extensively marked up. Penev et al. ("Semantic tagging of and semantic enhancements to systematics papers: ZooKeys working examples", doi:10.3897/zookeys.50.538) describes the process involved in creating these XML files.

ZooKeys (ISSN 1313-2970) is a new journal for the rapid publication of taxonomic names, rather like Zootaxa . On first glance it has some nice features, such as being Open Access (using the Creative Commons Attribution license), DOIs, and RSS feeds -- although these don't validate, partly due to an error at the bottom of the feeds: Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at

Trivial as this may seem, I'm trying to find out who designed this "Open Access" logo, and whether there are some original files for it. I've seen this logo (or variations on it) on the PLoS web site, the open access publisher Hindawi Publishing, and the Mac OS X program Papers uses it. It's driving me nuts that I can't find the original.