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Ants, Cells & Atoms

Life and matter below the width of a hair.

Image and data rights

Updated

Every figure on this site falls into one of three groups: diagrams and data tables made here, photographs and scans from other sources, and illustrations. Each group has its own terms, and every caption says which group its figure belongs to.

Diagrams and data tables made by this site

Zoom ladders, size charts, estimate charts, structure drawings made from published coordinates and the CSV files behind them are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, share and adapt them, including commercially, as long as you credit the source. Each figure carries a line you can copy:

"{Figure title}" by Ants, Cells & Atoms, {canonical article URL} — CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

A link back to the entry is one good way to give credit and is welcome, but it is not a condition of the license. The license covers only the layer drawn by this site. When a scale bar or an arrow sits beside a photograph from another source, the photograph keeps its own license and its own credit, stated in the same caption; the annotation is a separate layer and the photograph itself is unaltered.

Photographs and scans from other sources

This site owns no microscope and collects no samples, so every micrograph and every photograph of an insect comes from a source that publishes it under an open license. Accepted licenses are CC0, the Public Domain Mark, CC BY and CC BY-SA. Each caption carries the full credit in this form:

"{Title}" by {Creator} — {Source page URL} — {License name} ({License URL})

followed, where it applies, by ; changes: cropped, ; changes: resized or ; changes: annotation overlay. The creator is the person or body the source names for attribution, not the archive or platform that hosts the file. For a public-domain figure, the credit states why it is public domain: the creator's year of death together with the jurisdiction, or the explicit public-domain mark on the source page. "Published before some year" is not used as a reason on its own. When a credit runs long, the caption shows a short form and the full line sits in an expandable section on the same page.

Illustrations

A few entries carry an illustrated scene to set a mood or show a behavior. These are not photographs, micrographs or specimen records, they are not drawn to scale, and no size or structure should be read from them; sizes and structures are always in the diagrams. Each one carries this line:

Illustration: Ants, Cells & Atoms. Generated schematic illustration — not a photograph, micrograph or specimen record. © Ants, Cells & Atoms, all rights reserved.

Illustrations are not part of the CC BY 4.0 release. A scene that places a subject next to an everyday object is also labeled "Illustration — not to scale".

Datasets behind the entries

Scientific names, molecule identities and crystal data come from public databases. Only datasets whose terms allow redistribution are copied into this site's tables, and each is credited as its publisher asks:

  • GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, CC BY 4.0: credited with its dataset DOI, 10.15468/39omei, and the date of access.
  • Catalogue of Life, as published through GBIF, CC BY 4.0: credited with the checklist version DOI, 10.48580/dgyy9.
  • World Register of Marine Species, as published through GBIF, CC BY 4.0: credited with the DOI 10.14284/170 and the citation line each record carries.
  • PubChem, for compound names, formulas and identifiers: credited as PubChem with the publication it asks to be cited and the compound CID. Data contributed to PubChem by third parties is used only where that contributor's own license allows.
  • Wikidata, CC0: the source of the structure formulas (SMILES strings) from which this site computes molecular conformers.
  • Crystallography Open Database, CC0: lattice constants and space groups, credited with the COD entry number and the publication the entry cites.
  • RCSB Protein Data Bank, CC0: credited with the PDB ID and the original depositors.

Some references are used only to check a value and are never copied into tables: the NIST Computational Chemistry Comparison and Benchmark Database, the NIST Chemistry WebBook, the CODATA recommended values of the physical constants and the BioNumbers database. Where an entry uses a value found through one of them, it cites the original publication the value came from.

Fonts

Headings are set in Schibsted Grotesk, body text in PT Serif and figures and data in Martian Mono. All three are released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (https://openfontlicense.org/) and are served from this site rather than from a font service.

Citing a page

Every entry ends with a Cite this page block: the site name, the title, the publication date, the date of the last substantive revision and the permanent address. Add the date you accessed it in whatever style you use. This site does not issue DOIs, so no DOI should be quoted for any page here.

Questions

Questions about reuse, and reports of a credit that looks wrong, go to contact@antscellsandatoms.com.