A simple way to measure biodiversity is to count the total number of species living within a particular area. Tropical regions, areas that are year-round, have the most biodiversity. Temperate regions, which have warm summers and cold winters, have less biodiversity. Regions with cold or dry conditions, such as mountaintops and deserts, have even less temparatures.
Generally, the closer a region is to the Equator, the greater the biodiversity. At least 40,000 different plant species live in the Amazon rain forest of South America, one of the most biologically diverse regions on the planet.
Some places in the world have a large number of endemic whcih exist only in that place. The Cape Floristic Region in South Africa is home to about 6,200 plant species found nowhere else in the world.
Open access to the scientific literature means the removal of barriers (including price barriers) from accessing scholarly work. There are two parallel roads towards open access: Open Access articles and self-archiving. Open Access articles are immediately, freely available on their Web site, a model mostly funded by charges paid by the author (usually through a research grant). The alternative for a researcher is self-archiving (i.e., to publish in a traditional journal, where only subscribers have immediate access, but to make the article available on their personal and/or institutional Web sites (including so-called repositories or archives)), which is a practice allowed by many scholarly journals.
Open Access raises practical and policy questions for scholars, publishers, funders, and policymakers alike, including what the return on investment is when paying an article processing fee to publish in an Open Access articles, or whether investments into institutional repositories should be made and whether self-archiving should be made mandatory, as contemplated by some funders.
Last date updated on September, 2024
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