have gained in cogency by including aPalestinian perspective.

Were there reason to believe thatPalestinian scientists could participatefreely in such collaborations, unimpededby arbitrary and unpredictable curfewsimposed by an occupying army, denyingthem access to their own laboratories, not to mention European hosts, those of us who signed the call for a moratorium— not an unlimited boycott — might not have felt compelled to take such adrastic step.Ahmed Abbes*, Mikhael Balabane*,Emmanuel Farjoun†, Michael Harris‡,Raphael Rouquier‡, Pierre Schapira§*Université Paris 13, 99 Avenue Jean-BaptisteClément, 93430 Villetaneuse, France†Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91904, Israel‡Université Paris 7, 2 place Jussieu, 75251 Paris Cedex 05, France§Université Paris 6, 75252 Paris Cedex 05, France

Efforts to build bridgesin the Middle EastSir — I was delighted to see the Opinionarticle “Don’t boycott Israel’s scientists”(Nature 417, 1; 2002).

I do not pretend to be impartial: myfather, his brother and sister survived theShoah, but the entire rest of his family(more than 30 aunts, uncles and cousins)perished; I have spent each of mysabbaticals partly in Israel, have sponsoredstudents and post-docs from Israel, andhave binational science foundation grants.

I also serve on the Science AdvisoryBoard of the Arava Institute ofEnvironmental Studies, which attempts tosimultaneously do good science and buildbridges between Israel and its Arabneighbours.

I count Patrick Bateson as one of myfriends and grieved to see him leading theUK scientists in the direction of a boycott.

Your Opinion article beautifullyarticulates the reasons for continuing tosupport Israeli science. Marc MangelDepartment of Environmental Studies, 39 NaturalSciences 2, University of California, Santa Cruz,California 95064, USA

Taxonomists need betteraccess to published dataSir — The biodiversity community mustlearn from its counterparts in the physicaland biomedical sciences and move towardsthe provision of unhindered access to itsbaseline data: taxonomic descriptions,

imagery, geographical and temporal distribution, and characters — molecular,morphological and behavioural (see H. C. J. Godfray’s Commentary “Challengesfor taxonomy”, Nature 417, 17–20; 2002).

International codes of nomenclaturerequire taxonomic actions to be published,and the data thus made available. Yet muchof the underlying information is accessibleonly by examination of the specimensinvolved, so access is in effect limited to allbut a few potential users. The assertion ofcopyright by publishers further limits thedistribution of published information.

Very few libraries around the worldhave the financial capacity to carry the fullrange of literature in which systematicresults are published. To take the ants as one example, the 11,000 species werefirst formally described in approximately3,800 publications — roughly 100,000printed pages — in more than 800 serialsand monographs.

As F.-T. Krell noted in Correspondence(Nature 415, 957; 2002), the relevance oftaxonomic publications remains high formany years. Although funding has beensecured to make 80% of the ant pagesaccessible online within the next two yearsat www.antbase.org (see Nature 416, 115;2002), many recent papers are not in thepublic domain because of publishers’copyright restrictions.

To chart even the 1–1.5 million“known” species of the world (E. O.Wilson, Science 289, 2279; 2000) is adaunting task. International initiativessuch as the Global BiodiversityInformation Facility are needed to helppeople work effectively towards that goal,as are the development of tools frominformation technologies and a newcultural approach to ownership andsharing of data.

In the genomics community, authorsplace all sequence data in a publiclyaccessible depository. As a result, the data themselves can be peer-reviewed, and new areas of investigation havedeveloped through comparison andcollation of data sets.

The biodiversity and conservationcommunities would greatly benefit fromsimilar provision of open access tocharacter and distributional data. Becauseof space and cost constraints, many ofthese data are unpublished. We sorelyneed a mechanism to provide access tothese data, along the lines of GenBank, aswell as the cultural imperative to depositdata (see Godfray’s Commentary for aproposal to make taxonomy a web-basedunitary discipline).

For now, it would be a tremendousbenefit if publishers would make publishedtaxonomic papers open-access, so that anequivalent to PubMed can make this

important scientific information availableto the broadest possible community.Donat Agosti*, Norman F. Johnson†*American Museum of Natural History, New York,New York 10024-5192, USA†Insect Collection, Ohio State University,Columbus, Ohio 43210-1220 , USA

Advocacy and analysisSir — Roger A. Pielke, in his Commentary“Policy, politics and perspective” (Nature416, 367–368; 2002) argues that scientistsshould not be advocates; that researchshould be communicated to society throughpolicy analysts. Unlike the advocate, whosubordinates science to one narrow visionof its social implications, he says that theanalyst “increases the range of alternativesavailable to decision-makers by clearlyassociating scientific results with a range ofchoices and outcomes”.

Pielke objects to natural scientists whosimply advocate more research to helpsolve social problems — but he then arguessomething similar for his own form ofscience: social-science policy analysis.Pielke is right that more social-scientificresearch and analysis of science and itsresults would be beneficial. But with thisargument, is he not as much an advocate as those he criticizes?Carl MitchamLiberal Arts and International Studies, ColoradoSchool of Mines, Golden, Colorado 80401, USA

Specimen collecting isstill vital for researchSir — The monumental data set assembledand analysed by Ernst Mayr and JaredDiamond in their monograph The Birds ofNorthern Melanesia, reviewed by StephenPruett-Jones (Nature 415, 959–960; 2002),was based in part on museum skinspecimens obtained during generalcollecting expeditions over many years.

An unwillingness to acknowledge therole of specimens in scientific research iscontributing to the deterioration of avianbiodiversity collections and is hinderingthe thorough collecting that is so necessaryfor future studies. It has been argued thatfurther collecting is unnecessary even inpoorly inventoried areas, despite clearevidence to the contrary.

Seminal works such as Mayr’s andDiamond’s rely on specimen foundationsin museums. It is essential to acknowledgethis, so that the avian specimen base can beexpanded, understood and supported.Angelo CapparellaDepartment of Biological Sciences, Illinois StateUniversity, Normal, Illinois 61790-4120, USA

correspondence

222 NATURE | VOL 417 | 16 MAY 2002 | www.nature.com© 2002 Macmillan Magazines Ltd