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Featured Books
    All Featured Books
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Visit BHL
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
    • BHL at 20
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL
BHL News, Blog Reel

Happy New In-Copyright Materials!

Welcome to 2016 and BHL’s latest batch of in-copyright content! We have 8 new titles to add to the list since our last post.

Over the course of 2015, BHL secured the following:

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Where possible, BHL acquires permission in the form of a signed license agreement from copyright holders to digitize post-1922 publications. These publications are available for open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. Users are welcome to reuse the in-copyright content in BHL so long as they adhere to the terms of the CC license, meaning:

  • you attribute the content to the copyright holder
  • use the content for non-commercial purposes such as educational or personal use
  • share the content under the same license (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0)
 
This time around we have contributions from South Africa, United States, Scotland, Italy and England:
Special thanks to our Affiliate partners with BHL Africa from the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) who are contributing 3 new titles to the BHL collection. 
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  1. Bothalia (1918 to present) – named after General Botha, South Africa’s first Union Premier and Minister of Agriculture, the journal continues to this day as a principal publication about South Africa’s flora and fauna. Most recently, it is expanding in scope to include more information about African biodiversity and conservation topics.
  2. “Atlas and red list of the reptiles of South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland” (2014)
  3. Flora of Southern Africa (1963 to present)
View Full Size ImageSmithsonian Institution Scholarly Press has contributed “Watershed Research Perspectives” (1986) edited by David L. Correll. This publication is a collection of papers resulting from a 1985 watershed research workshop held at the Smithsonian’s Environmental Research Center.
The earliest issues of the newsletter Nemophila, published by the California Botanical Society, are now in BHL from 1919 to 1927. CBS is better known for its premier publication, Madroño which is also in BHL. We are very pleased to support the digital archives of this 103 year old society who support the scientific research initiatives and community outreach for Western American botany.

The quarterly magazine and journal for members of the Scottish Ornithologists’ Club, Scottish Bird News, will be in BHL soon. The following graphic summarizes nicely the importance of the SOC for Scotland’s bird enthusiasts and researchers alike. For now, selected back files are available via the organization’s website. 
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Dating back to the 1870s, Italy’s foremost organization dedicated to malacological research, the Società Italiana di Malacologia (SIM), has generously contributed later volumes of its Bollettino Malacologico (1979 to present, with 3 yr embargo) to the BHL collection. Its earliest volumes actually preceded the formalization of the society and are available in BHL as the Bullettino malacologico italiano. Stay tuned for the later volumes to come.

Now in their 155th year, the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union “is devoted to studying and recording Yorkshire’s flora and fauna…as an association of amateur and professional naturalists covering a wide range of aspects of natural history.” BHL will soon include later volumes of their triannual publication The Naturalist in our online collection. You can see its earliest volumes in BHL from 1864.
Digitization is in progress for these titles and you can see them appearing via our recent additions list.

Want to see more in-copyright content in BHL? Let us know what you’d like to see!
January 20, 2016by [email protected]
BHL News, Blog Reel

From Scarborough to Svjatoj Nos: BHL’s latest in-copyright additions

Portrait version of the Biodiversity Heritage Library logo.

What do the Scarborough District, tigers, Socieded Cientifica Argentina, Auckland Institute and Museum, birds and the Svjatoj Nos wetlands have in common?

Actually not much…

…except that they are the newest in-copyright additions to the BHL collection!

If you still think that BHL is strictly about legacy literature, think again. Although still a very small portion of our collection, in-copyright titles now total over 400 from 170 licensors. Please see our Permissions page to learn more about the in-copyright content in our collection.

Where possible, BHL acquires permission in the form of a signed license agreement from copyright holders to digitize post-1922 publications. These publications are available for open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. Users are welcome to reuse the in-copyright content in BHL so long as they adhere to the terms of the CC license, meaning:

  • you attribute the content to the copyright holder,
  • use the content for non-commercial purposes such as educational or personal use
  • share the content under the same license (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Our latest (bio)diverse mix of titles hails from all over the world:

The Natural History of the Scarborough District
Since 1889, the Scarborough Field Naturalists’ Society has encouraged the organization of “amateur naturalists’ with interests throughout the spectrum of natural history.” BHL is pleased to include this publication in our collection as we feel we are the perfect place for these types of smaller scholarly society publications.

Tracking tigers : a review of the status of tiger, Asian elephant, gaur, and banteng in Vietnam, Lao, Cambodia, and Yunnan (China), with recommendations for future conservation action by Will Duckworth and Simon Hedges (1998)
In 1998 the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Indochina programme commissioned a report on the status of large mammals. “It was an incredible piece of work and represents an expertly pieced together compilation of data and information from every source possible” explains Michael Baltzer, Director of the WWF Tigers Alive Initiative. As the first in-copyright WWF publication to become a part of the BHL collection, we hope this is a good sign for additional WWF publications to come.

Anales de la Sociedad Cientifica Argentina
A pioneering institution for scientific study in Argentina since 1872, the Sociedad Cientifica Argentina has published its Anales for over 130 years. BHL is thrilled to be able to provide this complete publication through the present day. Digitization of the Anales is underway and should be available shortly.

Bulletin of the Auckland Institute and Museum and Poirieria
The Auckland Museum Institute dates back to 1867 when it assumed the management of the Auckland Museum and became the regional representative of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Its Bulletin covers a spectrum of topics related to natural and human history. The Auckland Shell Club was formed in 1931 as a section of the Auckland Museum Institute, dedicated to “all things molluscan, ie: shell collecting (recent and fossil), conchology and malacology (study of shells and shellfish), and molluscan ecology and conservation.” These publications will be available in BHL soon.

Ornithological Society of Turkey Bird reports and Ornithological Society of Turkey Bulletins 
In 1978, the Ornithological Society of the Middle East (OSME) formed as a successor to the Ornithological Society of Turkey. Its purpose is to promote research and address conservation issues for birds in the region between, “between Europe, China and the Horn of Africa on two major migration flyways crossing Central Asia’s wind-swept steppes, the Caucasus’s towering mountains, Arabia’s wide arid deserts and the tropical seas of the Indian Ocean.” Previously, the OSME gave permission for BHL to include Sandgrouse and its Bulletin in our collection. It has now added 2 more titles, published under its former name. Please stay tuned for digital copies of the Bird reports and Bulletins to appear in the coming weeks.

Ecology of the Svjatoj Nos wetlands, Lake Baikal by J. Mlíkovský & P. Stýblo (eds.)

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These stunning wetlands are located on the Kola Peninsula along one of the most northeastern coasts in Russia. BHL is pleased to make this work available in our collection soon.

Digitization is in progress for these titles and you can see them appearing via our recent additions list.

Want to see more in-copyright content in BHL? Let us know what you’d like to see!

October 22, 2015by [email protected]
BHL News, Blog Reel

Got In-Copyright Content?

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library’s collection of in-copyright titles continues to grow. Besides including, where possible, the in-copyright publications produced by our consortium library partners, we also digitize copyrighted titles by permission from the organizations or authors who generously sign our standard license agreement.

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Download BHL license agreement form

We are very pleased to announce the recent acquisition of permission from the Bombay Natural History Society, the Entomological Society of British Columbia, the Flemish Entomological Society and the Hungarian Geological Society to provide their publications for free and open access. To date we have agreements with over 160 licensors to provide 390 in-copyright titles in our collection. Since the start of 2015, we have received permission to include or continue the digitization of:

  • Halteres (2009–)
  • The Bean Bag (1974–)
  • Indo-Pacific mollusca (1959 — 1976)
  • Actes de la Société Linnéenne de Bordeaux (1826 — 1970)
  • Bulletin de la Société Linnéenne de Bordeaux (1971–)
Stay tuned for more to come! All in-copyright content in BHL is assigned a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license meaning that anyone is free to “use, reproduce, supplement, modify, create derivatives, and otherwise use the title(s), for any and all non-commercial purposes, with proper attribution to the licensor as the source.” In short, you can reuse the in-copyright content as long as it’s not for commercial reasons, you attribute the copyright holder, and apply the same license on your own creation.
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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

While the majority of BHL’s collection revolves around “legacy” materials, meaning titles in the public domain in the United States (because well, it’s easier to digitize materials without having to broker permission first), we are doing our best to increase the inclusion of in-copyright materials where possible.

Do you hold copyright to a title that you think should be in the BHL collection? If so, please see more information about our permissions process via http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/permissions and contact us.

Some highlights from our in-copyright title collection include…

  • Revue Suisse de Zoologie
  • Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington
  • Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington
  • Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales
  • Tijdschrift voor Entomologie
April 30, 2015by [email protected]

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About BHL

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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