Page R. Visualising Geophylogenies in Web Maps Using GeoJSON. PLOS Currents Tree of Life. 2015 Jun 23 . Edition 1. doi:10.1371/currents.tol.8f3c6526c49b136b98ec28e00b570a1e.At the time of writing the DOI hasn't registered, so the direct link is here. There is a GitHub repository for the manuscript and code.
I chose PLoS Currents Tree of Life because it is (supposedly) quick and cheap. Unfortunately a perfect storm of delays in reviewing together with licensing issues resulted in the paper taking nearly three months to appear. The licensing issues were a headache. PLoS uses the Creative Commons CC-BY license for all its content. Unfortunately, the original submission included maps from Google Maps and Open Street Map (OSM), to show that the GeoJSON produced by my tool could work with either. Google Maps tile imagery is not freely available, so I had to replace that in order for PLoS to be able to publish my figures. At first I used simply replaced the tiles Google Maps displays with ones from OSM, but those tiles are CC-BY-SA, which is incompatible with PLoS's use of CC-BY. Argh! I got stroppy about this on Twitter:
FFS. So it appears I can't use either Google Maps or Open Street Map in a @PLOSCurrents article. Open licensing somehow feels worse than ©
— Roderic Page (@rdmpage) June 16, 2015But, enough grumbling. The article is out, the code is in GitHib. Now to think about how to use it.
