Want free-to-use silhouettes of organisms? PhyloPic is here!
February 3, 2012
I’m very aware that I’ve been whining incessantly on this blog recently: RWA this, Elsevier that, moan whine complain. So I’m delighted to be able to bring some good news. Mike Keesey’s site PhyloPic.org is back up, in new and improved form, and providing free silhouettes of organisms extincts and extant. To quote the site’s FAQ:
PhyloPic‘s database stores reusable silhouette images of organisms. Each image is associated with one or more taxonomic names and indicates roughly what the ancestral member(s) of each taxon looked like.
PhyloPic also stores a phylogenetic taxonomy of all organisms. This means that you can perform phylogenetic searches. For example, if you need an image for a certain taxon, but there is no exact match in the database, you can easily search that taxon’s supertaxa, subtaxa, and related taxa for an image that may work as well.
For example, there is a page about Giraffatitan brancai, which includes a link to a silhouette by Scott Hartman; and a page about Brachiosaurus altithorax, which has two silhouettes — one by Scott and one by me.
More interestingly, for each taxon, you can ask for an illustrated lineage. For example, the illustrated lineage of Giraffatitan brancai starts with that animal, then works its way up via images for Brachiosauridae, Titanosauriformes, Camarasauromorpha, and continues up through a total of 36 images, finishing up with Holozoa, Cytota and Panbiota.
Better still, because all the images are available to re-use (subject to some restrictions which I’ll discuss below), you’re free to use them to make collages like this one, which Mike Keesey did for our friend Giraffatitan brancai:
One of the great things about this site is that it’s a community effort: Mike built the site and has prepared a good chunk of the artwork so far, but PhyloPic is open to submissions from anyone who cares to register (or to login via Google, Twitter, etc.)
Mike has allowed some latitude in the licences that can be used when images are added. You can currently choose from any of:
- Public Domain Mark 1.0 [for declaring that an image is already PD]
- Public Domain Dedication 1.0 [for putting an image into the PD]
- Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported
- Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported
- Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
- Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
That choice is nice for contributing artists, but makes life a bit more awkward for users because any composite artwork has to be licenced under the most restrictive combination of the licences of its parts. In the case of the collage above, because Scott’s Giraffatitan brancai was uploaded as CC-BY-NC-SA, that’s how the whole image ends up, too. This means that if, say, you want to make T-shirts on Cafe Press with this image on them, you’ll have a bit of nightmare figuring out exactly who you need to get permission from.
Mike has to walk a fine line with this. The images would be most useful to the world if they were all public domain and could be remixed, reused and reproduced with no restrictions whatsoever; but you can’t blame artists for wanting to put some limits on this. Yet even when the most permissive non-public domain licence is used (CC-BY), the light requirement that the image must be credited ends up as a heavy requirement when, as with the collage above, you use thirty images that all need to be acknowledged.
Anyway, these are wrinkles. The point is: free, re-usable art! Go and use it; and add to it!
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
February 3, 2012 at 4:30 pm
Thanks for the plug!
I agree that the inclusion of Non-Commercial licenses is somewhat regrettable. It was a tough choice. From the Submission Page:
“The Public Domain licenses are strongly encouraged, as they have the fewest barriers for reuse…. The Creative Commons Noncommercial licenses are discouraged, since the provisions are not well defined, and can have unintended consequences. However, you are free to choose one of them if you wish.”
Not having a non-commercial option was a blocker to some professional artists. (Understandably, since this is how they earn their livings.) In the end I decided having more silhouettes was better, especially since many users will likely be using them for non-commercial purposes (e.g., this blog post). I did draw a line, though — I don’t allow any “No Derivatives” licenses, as those are basically useless.
As part of the APIs I’ll be building some methods that make collecting attributions and license data for image sets a bit easier. (If you can program at all, anyway.)
February 3, 2012 at 9:32 pm
When I uploaded my first image, I had to do a lot of thinking before choosing which license to use. Of course the project is more useful if it’s all just public domain, and I would like to donate my images without restrictions. But, as a graphic designer who’s been searching for work for nearly a year now, the idea that others could profit off of my images is a hard pill to swallow. I’m also uncomfortable with the idea of others using my work in a way that I would not agree with (on a creationist blog, for example). Despite my concerns, I really want to share the work with people who will use it to promote science and learning, so the Creative Commons licenses are a nice way to split the difference. I don’t want to speak for other artists, but I’m sure most of them who’ve used the Creative Commons licenses will have no problems with pretty much any use of the work they’ve shared…they just want to be acknowledged or asked. Since we’re giving away our work for free, I don’t really feel like it’s too much to ask to just send a quick email to the artist first (or whatever the case may be).
Anyway, it’s an excellent project and resource, and I hope more artists will contribute!
February 6, 2012 at 4:20 am
Hey Mike,
This may not surprise you, but I agree with Sharon – in fact, I think the tone of your post is (unintentionally, I have no doubt) quite wrong: Mike Keesey’s PhyloPic is a wonderful site, and as far as I know it provides a totally unique tool for education and science. Anyone who wants to use it within that scope are welcome to use a LOT of high quality artwork for free, and with easy discovery and aggregation by lineage. Mike has donated a ton of time, programming skills, and a lot of his own art. Many other people came together to make the database more useful to students, teachers, researchers, etc.
The fact that you indicate it’s burden to credit all the artists, or “a nightmare” to have to try and ask people for permission before commercial or promotional use (e.g. Cafe Press T-shirts) strikes me as a bit…ungrateful? Stuff doesn’t come from nowhere, and quality stuff especially so.
If you wanted to use my particular images for an SV-POW T-shirt (even without my name on it) I’d certainly say yes, but what if AiG wanted to make one? What if Elsevier wanted to make T-shirts promoting their cause in Congress? Is your implication that we should supply our work free, unrestricted, and unattributed to all, including those who would use them against our field, simply so it’s less of a burden on the end user to make a buck off of the end result? How is that even good for PhyloPic itself? PhyloPic will work best with years (decades!) of more and better contributions, updating of images, etc., but how does that happen if we undercut the very people who will be doing that work?
I rarely show up in these “whoa’s be the artist” discussions, and I’m actually quite concerned with how onerous much of copyright law is, but in this case I really think your (well-intentioned) commentary is off-base. Moreover, I actually think it could cause other artists to become hesitant about wanting to contribute to PhyloPic, if the initial response from users is going to be “how come we can’t strip the artists out of the final product just a wee-bit more?”.
I should add that I’m not looking for an artist crusade here, and regular readers must know of how the SV-POW crew has advocated for paleoart and paleoartists in the past (I’m sure that was in fact much of the reason for this particular entry). So sincerely, mean no hard feelings, I’m just not sure I can agree with the caveats you listed as they are expressed here.
Best,
-Scott
P.S. FWIW I plan to put my body of work into Public Domain in my will – but it makes up a very non-trivial part of my income right now, and I have a family to feed. On the other hand, I would have happily donated two images to the skeletal anatomy guide you made a while back, if you’d asked.
February 6, 2012 at 7:03 am
I agree with Sharon and Scott on this one, too (and I share Scott’s sentiment that any perceived slights from Mike are unintentional). For instance, if you put together a figure for publication using these 30 silhouettes from 30 different artists, I’m sure those 30 people appreciate it. I like to think of it from an analogous situation – I’d be royally annoyed if someone used my research without citing it (even if it’s OA). Art is a very different situation from academic publishing, too – scientists don’t get paid directly for publication of their work, whereas this is how artists make their living. I’m willing to live with some differences between distribution of art and distribution of science for that reason.
February 6, 2012 at 8:06 am
I’d propose that it has to do with the degree in which the artist identifies with PhyloPic and the context in which credit is being made.
If I feel that a ‘PhyloPic’ credit includes me, then I’ll feel credited as a part of that community.
The more crucial issue is context. If someone is using these to print a t-shirt, 20 name credits would kinda ruin the shirt. Then again, A participatory financial percentage would be called for, if the t-shirt is commercial. If it’s being printed in a journal with limited space, so that other participants (researchers, references, etc.) even get short credit, I’d find it odd to see my name with 30 other artists. And I’d find it unfortunate if the graphics aren’t included because the space for name credits wasn’t available.
As Mike says, wrinkles.
Ideal would be some sort of meta-tag credit that allows association but not so adamantly in the foreground.
February 6, 2012 at 8:42 am
Thanks to all for comments. I take Scott’s point, particularly about the appearance of ingratitude. And I also recognise that what’s right for science (unlimited free use for everyone) isn’t always right for art. (This by the way is one of the wrinkles in the push for universal open access to scholarly research: while nearly all scientists support it, at least in principle, some academics in the arts do not.)
Regarding the use of the Non-Commercial clause in the licence, and potential loss of revenue if it’s not used: I suppose it comes down to whether an artist thinks he or she can make money from silhouettes. My guess would be no in almost all cases. This is very different, of course, from the situation with complete artworks such as skeletal reconstructions or (especially) life restorations. Have any of you even been paid for the use of a silhouette?
February 6, 2012 at 3:23 pm
At least in some cases (Scott Hartman’s, for instance – please correct me if I’m wrong), I suspect the silhouettes are direct derivatives of skeletal reconstructions. Thus, the silhouette and income-generating skeletal are intimately linked.
February 6, 2012 at 3:34 pm
You make an interesting point about open publishing. Still, I think the apparent contradictions can be easily worked around – it’s not clear to me that open access to a paper has to include the commercial use of the images in a paper. What scientific purpose does it serve if Hasbro can lift images from PlosONE to use on their toy packaging free and unattributed? Certainly it wouldn’t be hard to create a “scientific CC” license that would allow for news outlets to use the images (“promotion of said scientific work”) that would include the usual “fair use” venues, without including commercial works. If someone wants to use them in a kids book or on a t-shirt, then they ought to have to contact the artists (whether it’s a cladogram, a strat section, or a skeletal reconstruction).
Getting a bit farther afield, I personally feel that the shift to open publishing (if done right) could help with a serious annoyance with the current journal system; the problem isn’t merely that the journals insist upon owning all the copyrights, but that some academics (who I feel should know better) take unethical advantage of that. Many books lift images from technical papers without getting permission from the artists (which is their legal right as long as the publisher’s permission is obtained) and then simply site the authors’ of the paper, rather than the person who did the image (even when the name is abundantly clear). Don Glut’s otherwise excellent Dinosaur Encyclopedia series does this repeatedly.
I realize it’s legal to do this, but it’s highly unethical in my opinion. No, not the money – it’s the lack of credit. As far as I’m concerned it’s like attributing research to the editors of a volume of papers, but not mentioning the authors of the individual papers. And it has real-world repercussions – back when I was still a young skeletal-drawing-whipper-snapper I was accused more than once of having ripped off the skeletal drawing of Nothronychus that appeared in Kirkland & Wolfe’s 2001 description (which was reprinted in one of Glut’s encyclopedia updates…attributed to them) because they were “almost identical”.
You can probably guess the punch line, but they certainly were identical, I’d drawn the illustrations for their paper! I was credited generously by Kirkland and Wolfe, but apparently it was “too difficult” to ferret out who to credit in subsequent uses.
And that actual brings me full circle back to your question on how much money is in a silhouette – I have made some money off of them before, but it’s admittedly a pretty small amount. The larger issue is name recognition. Even in today’s social-media filled world, little is better for promoting yourself than having your name next to an image (and when that’s not possible, in the acknowledgments). And in the era of Google’s PageRank and other search algorithms this is doubly important, since increased mentions (or better: links) can make you more discoverable.
So the concern isn’t driven by the revenues that would be lost by people using the silhouettes, it’s by the revenue you may lose when an interested party can’t figure out who created the image in front of them.
February 6, 2012 at 6:41 pm
I’d like to raise one other point: it is actually possible, in some circumstances, to use images with a CC-BY-NC license for commercial purposes. And it’s even possible, sometimes, to do so without explicitly crediting the artist in the work! How is such a thing possible?
By asking the artist for permission!
On most image pages, you can find a link saying: “Contact the person who submitted this image.” (Some people have opted out of this.) Click that link. They won’t always agree, but you can try.
February 6, 2012 at 7:10 pm
Mike Keesey said:
“And it’s even possible, sometimes, to do so without explicitly crediting the artist in the work! How is such a thing possible?
By asking the artist for permission!”
I’m Scott Hartman, and I endorse this message.
February 7, 2012 at 10:22 am
Thanks, Scott, lots to think about here.
Before I plough into details, let me be clear (as though this even
needs saying) that I absolutely support the right of artists to choose
the terms under which they make their work available. Where I
disagree with you, it’s much more about tactics than fundamentals.
So, onwards:
You do realise that they can already do this, right? PLoS ONE
papers are made available under a CC-BY licence without an NC
(non-commercial) clause. Their only responsibility if they wanted to
use your PLoS-published artwork in packaging would be to credit you.
(But then, that is exactly what you say below that you care about, so
maybe it works out OK.)
I fear it would be hard. If it was easy, the CC people, who
have invested a lot of time, would have done it already. The problem
always going to defining your boundaries. What is “commercial”? It’s
easy to come up with edge-cases, and the inclusion of an NC clause
always and inevitably has a chilling effect on re-use, whether
intended or not. It’s an intuitively appealing clause (I wanted to
use it myself back when I was trying to donate Xenoposeidon
photos to Wikimedia) but beset with problems.
To be fair, I think this is nearly always taking ignorant advantage
rather than unethical advantage. I certainly couldn’t swear I’ve not
made this mistake myself, and certainly not with malice: I’ve only
recently become properly aware of the web of issues here, and I
suspect that most other authors are some way behind. (Side-thought:
people who get to design Introduction To Science course should
probably include a session on copyright, licences and attribution.
I’m lookin’ at you, Wedel.)
Come to think of it, I am 99.3% sure that Janensch didn’t do his own
artwork for his numerous Tendaguru sauropod monographs. I have
reproduced figures from his papers in my 2009
“Brachiosaurus“-brancai-is-not-Brachiosaurus
paper, with explicit permission from the publisher, and credited
Janensch rather than whoever the artist was. Oops.
OK. I admit I am surprised by this.
That makes sense. So it seems that what you really care about is the
BY clause rather than the NC — which, hopefully, means that you’re
not too worried about the implications when your images appear in PLoS
publications.
In general, I am right with you on BY clauses. When reusing a single
piece of artwork, or say four or five in a composite figure, then it’s
clearly right to attribute each individual element, whatever the
licence says. It only becomes a problem when you have images like
Mike Keesey’s Giraffatitan artwork above, where you have to
credit thirty-something people. But I don’t think there’s any
reasonable way to write a licence that lets you out of that.
February 7, 2012 at 4:04 pm
Heck yes you should cite the 30-something people involved in a multi-part figure. Putting it all directly in the caption might be unwieldy – but you could certainly put it as an endnote or appendix or in the acknowledgments. Not citing the 30 people is akin to not citing the 30 papers that provided data for a table. Inconvenient, yes, but still the right thing to do.
February 7, 2012 at 6:05 pm
It’s also worth pointing out that putting the credit *in* the actual image (along with the license info) is going above and beyond.
February 7, 2012 at 8:14 pm
Good comments by all – I agree with Andy and Mike (K) that putting the credits in other places (not actually on the image) is totally reasonable. Indeed, in online publication I wouldn’t even be offended if there was just a “Credit” link to a persistent list (maybe with links built into the name for contact info or something), although I don’t recall offhand which CC licenses (if any) specifically account for that possibility.
@Mike (T) – all good points. I am fully aware that PlosONE goes further than many artists would like – my specific point was that it doesn’t have to be that way, if we bother to create a more science-specific CC license (or some other copy-left provision). It may not change, but I see nothing inevitable about Open Access publishing having to be this way. That’s why I see it has an “apparent contraction”.
Also note that it’s never prevented me from supplying images to PlosONE papers – I still feel that supporting science (both the individual papers as well as OA publishing in general) is more important than whatever is risked by endorsing this sort of OA license. For me, at least, there’s a lot of gray area here between “ideal” and “better than the current alternative”. And as you indicate, in both science papers and PhyloPic I am indeed more concerned about attribution than the potential for someone to skirt the license and make a little money anyhow.
On to Janensch! I’m 99.4% certain that he never credited the artist in the papers, in part because the artist was almost certainly paid for the work (relieving him/her of any copyrights), and partially because Janensch lived at a time when science had a barely post-Victorian outlook on crediting people beyond the grand old man who was the author of the monograph. If no artist is credited, then you have little choice but to credit the paper’s authors, who presumably either did the work themselves, or arranged the proper terms to own the work.
Of course in today’s world art is generally provided to scientific publication either as a favor, or at greatly reduced price, and part of those deals usually involves crediting the artist in the paper. I’d argue that in the case of staff illustrators or other paid work, it still makes sense to credit them in the original paper – but I’m also fully cognizant that this is a modern development, and not something you often see even in the 1960s and ’70s, let alone the turn of the 19th century.
I take your point that many instances of non-citation may well be due to ignorance rather than any malice – quite possible the majority of them. And even in say Don Glut’s case (since I’ve already used his encyclopedia series as an example) I don’t hold any sort of grudge against him. At the same time, in a case like that where scientific attribution is otherwise fanatically maintained (indeed, the citation-heavy nature of those volumes is largely what makes them so useful), it’s hard not to feel the results are very wrong, regardless of the intent. Indeed, images that were solicited directly from artists are actually credited, which makes it seem all the more inexcusable that the time couldn’t be taken when removing the images from a technical paper to look to see if the artist was also credited.
By the way, I think “Illustrated by X, in Y&Z, 2009” is a great format for this sort of thing. In fact, it’s preferable than just citing the artist in my opinion, because the artist may make revisions later, so citing the publication adds permanence to that particular image.
Lastly (“finally!”, right?), I don’t know that I completely agree that it would be so hard to come up with a new science-based CC license – in my experience the issue is usually somewhat glossed over by assuming it will be similar in need to other educational licensing, but I may be off base here.
So let’s simplify it: Why not just let submitting authors choose to make the images in a PlosONE paper be CC BY-NC? What has been lost in that process? And whatever we come up with, that’s basically all that would have to be integrated into a hypothetical CC BY-NS (non-science) license.
As for making money from just silhouettes – I’ve created signs for several museums (and advisory diagrams for a couple of other media projects) that were just using the silhouettes, since the key there was showing different sizes in several different animals (usually either from a single formation, or else in an evolutionary lineage).
I don’t know that I’d ever lose those sorts of jobs due to PhyloPic, but it’s worth the risk, as PhyloPic has the ability to improve science education and writing, and we need more of that right now.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think by and large we’re in vehement agreement on the principals here, it’s the implementation (tactics) that sees some variety of opinion? Which is fine…that seems to be how we reach the best solutions anyhow.
February 7, 2012 at 8:30 pm
One more thing about CC licenses and “NC” clause; there is a recent paper that you may be interested in:
Hagedorn G, Mietchen D, Morris RA, Agosti D, Penev L, Berendsohn WG, Hobern D. 2011. Creative Commons licenses and the non-commercial condition: Implications for the re-use of biodiversity information. In: Smith V, Penev L (Eds) e-Infrastructures for data publishing in biodiversity science. ZooKeys 150: 127–149. http://dx.doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.150.2189
February 7, 2012 at 9:19 pm
I just read the paper that Tomasz linked, and it’s worth a read by everyone. While some of the issues are very well considered (especially the need for Creative Commons to further clarify what “non-commercial” is), I think the conclusions are off-base in much the same way that I objected to some of Mike Taylor’s original post.
The authors’ fixate on the “potential risk” to organizations of using a CC BY-NC license and move from there to how it “comes at a large cost to society” in that smaller organizations may avoid them because they can’t afford the legal costs (or risks) of using such licenses, and may therefore avoid them.
I’d like to be really clear how I feel about this argument:
BULLSHIT.
Honestly, in a different forum I’d prefer to use a lot more profanity. This is so wrong-headed it’s painful. In this age of IM, email, and other forms of internet communication it’s cheap and easy to contact the artist(s) that created a CC BY-NC work, and then you can easily find out the exact liability, get permission to use it explicitly, etc.
The idea that a NC license is a significant burden because, Darwin-forbid, you might have to actually contact the original artist before using the work (if you aren’t 100% sure your usage would be allowed under a CC license) is crazy talk.
Honestly, how has it even come to this? How can well-educated people in scientific journals even contemplate the expectation that having to designate someone in your organization to email a few dozen people is “prohibitively expensive”?
I’m not just talking about this as a hypothetical either; at the WDC we had a very small budget (we often could barely cover printing costs and materials cost despite building and designing everything in house), and displays one just one portion of my job.We tried to pay people when we could (usually at most $100 for an image) and took donations of artwork when we could, and somehow all by myself I manage to get permission to use enough paleo artwork to completely overhaul a 15,000 square foot display. I had to email dozens of people over a the course of my projects there, but it turns out this was a really quite efficient use of my time (and our budget).
Honestly, if you run a small conservation organization (which seems to be the target audience of that paper) or something similar and you can’t find any artwork to use because you can’t be bothered to even try and contact the artist(s), I’m not sure you have any business being in a leadership role.
February 7, 2012 at 9:47 pm
I should add that my above comments pertain to the Zootaxa article as they apply to artwork – for academic publishing I agree with the main points (and your new post on applying a CC BY-NC to full journal articles).
February 7, 2012 at 10:20 pm
Scott says:
Mmmm, yes. The disconnect here is, you’re thinking like an artist. The ZooKeys paper is not really about reusing artwork (where, yes, it’s usually pretty tractable to contact the creator). It’s about works with data in. And there, asking permission doesn’t scale. If I want to text-mine the corpus of 50,000 or however many PLoS ONE papers it is now, I can just do it. But if PLoS used an NC licence, there is no realistic way I could obtain 50,000 permission. Just keeping track of what I do and do not have permission to use would be nightmarish. As you well know, people more on, email addresses become stale. If only one in fifty papers has this problem, then I have 1000 rights issues to track down. Not what I want to be doing when I could be doing research.
Scale, scale, scale! That’s where the future is! A few years ago we were doing cladistic analyses with 20 characters; now we’re using 2000. So it will go with every area of endeavour. We are going to need to reduce friction to an absolute minimum to make this work. In the end, I think we’re going to see works that impose restrictions simply ignored by gigantic automated processes that just can’t go spinning out masses of administrativr work for humans.
February 7, 2012 at 10:21 pm
“for academic publishing I agree with the main points.”
Oh, rats. If only I’d read this comment before writing my long reply to the previous one :-)
OK, looks like we’re in agreement.