GBIF and Pensoft signed a Memorandum of Cooperation

The Memorandum of Cooperation formalises the basis for the two organisations to facilitate discovery and access to ‘primary biodiversity data’ simultaneously with scholarly publication using GBIF’s infrastructure. ZooKeys calls upon its authors to submit supporting primary biodiversity data together with their manuscript, in conformance with GBIF promoted standards. ZooKeys will make the GBIF ‘Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT)’ available from its website. GBIF will provide ZooKeys with standards for primary biodiversity data sharing and a template, to be included in Zookeys’ ‘instructions for authors’. GBIF will also provide remote help-desk support to ZooKeys for ensuring maintenance of the IPT software.

On June 1, 2009, ZooKeys became the first open access journal in systematics to facilitate discovery and access to ‘primary biodiversity data’ simultaneously with scholarly publication using the GBIF infrastructure, when a paper by Miller, Griswold and Yin (2009) (http://www.pensoftonline.net/zookeys), doi: 10.3897/zookeys.11.160, published a dataset via the GBIF data portal as part of the ZooKeys publication process, which includes the assignment of a distinct DoI for datasets, a KML file with distinct DoI, etc. (see http://www.gbif.org/News/NEWS1243931673).

“Signing of MoC between ZooKeys and GBIF is a milestone step towards open access to primary biodiversity data, and an example we expect other journals will follow” says Dr. Mark Costello, President of the Society for the Management of Electronic Biodiversity Data (SMEBD). SMEBD, which recently joined GBIF as an Associate Participant, represents over 500 individual scientists who contribute to online biodiversity databases.