
Recording large amounts of newly deposited biodiversity data every day, the Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR) passes the 200,000-deposits milestone. BLR, the collaborative effort of Pensoft and Plazi, develops an automated information-extraction workflow that integrates subsequently into a powerful archive hosted on Zenodo, a catch-all repository developed by OpenAIRE and CERN.
The automated workflow ensures that articles and their sub-article elements, including illustrations, taxonomic treatments, metadata, images, figures, and supplementary files, are assigned individual persistent digital object identifier (e.i. DOIs), then cross-referenced, and uploaded to the repository. As Donat Agosti, president of Plazi, explains, "The Plazi workflow allows, for the first time, access to citing and reusing the hidden data in scientific publications, thus opening up scientific literature in an unprecedented way." It is worth noting, BLR is open to any researcher, regardless of location and institutional affiliation.
BLR currently accounts for more than 60% of all Zenodo deposits, while occupying only 1.2% of the physical space of Zenodo. This calls for a rapid expansion of the process to add more data. The value of Zenodo is its robustness, speed of service, standardization, mining of persistent identifiers (i.e. DataCite DOIs), the emphasis on adding related items, machine upload, and the export in various formats and sustainability.
The Biodiversity Literature Repository is an open community on Zenodo, run currently by Plazi and Pensoft. Publishers and scientists are encouraged to help to contribute to enhance a resource.
For more information, see:
- Biodiversity Literature Repository
- TreatmentBank (digital taxonomic literature repository)
- News articles: EurekAlert, Plazi