Lissomus arawak measures under a centimetre long and is easily recognised by its shining and almost hairless black body, alongside its pale-yellow antennae segments.
A new species of click beetle with a glossy and highly domed black body has been described from cloud forest sites in the mountains of the Dominican Republic, and named in honour of the Arawak peoples who lived on the island before European colonisation.
Lissomus arawak measures under a centimetre long and is easily recognised by its shining and almost hairless black body, alongside its pale-yellow antennae segments. It is only the third species of the genus Lissomus known from Hispaniola, and the third recorded anywhere in the Greater Antilles.
Lissomus arawak, dorsal habitus. Image by J. Pirkl, 2025, used with permission.
Lissomus arawak, ventral habitus. Image by J. Pirkl, 2025, used with permission.
Lissomus arawak, lateral habitus. Image by J. Pirkl, 2025, used with permission.
The study, published in the open-access journal Alpine Entomology, was carried out by Paul J. Johnson of South Dakota State University and Jiri Hodecek of the Swiss Human Institute of Forensic Taphonomy, as part of an ongoing survey of Dominican insect life. Specimens were found at three sites in montane broadleaf and cloud forest between roughly 600 and 700 metres, near the Sierra de Bahoruco and in the Cordillera Septentrional.
Rather than resembling the two other Lissomus species already known from Hispaniola, the new beetle turned out to be structurally closer to species from Central and northern South America.
“The morphological differences suggest that the Lissomus species of Hispaniola may not all descend from a single colonisation event.
One possible explanation is therefore that ancestors of these beetles reached the Greater Antilles on at least two separate occasions. This remains a testable hypothesis rather than a demonstrated evolutionary history.”
The Research Team
The species is known from just five specimens, collected individually between 1985 and 2024, all of them female.
“With such a small sample, chance and the opportunistic nature of the collecting are probably the simplest explanations. This does not seriously weaken our confidence that L. arawak is distinct. All five females share a consistent and unique combination of morphological characters.”
The Research Team
Type locality of Lissomusarawak in Pedernales province (el. 700 m).
The name is a deliberate tribute to the island’s first inhabitants:
“We chose the name arawak to recognise the Indigenous history and continuing cultural heritage of the Antilles. We wanted the name of this distinctive endemic species to connect the biological history of the island with its human history.”
The discovery forms part of a wider effort, they added, “to document the island’s still incompletely known insect diversity,” with at least 15 further click beetle species thought to await description in the Dominican Republic alone.
The discovery forms part of EntomoDR, a long-term field and taxonomy project documenting the still incompletely known insect diversity of the Dominican Republic through repeated expeditions and collaboration with an international network of taxonomic specialists. More information about the project and its discoveries is available at https://entomodr.com
Original source:
Johnson PJ, Hodecek J (2026) Lissomus arawak sp. nov. (Coleoptera, Elateridae), a new species from the Dominican Republic. Alpine Entomology 10: 155-161. https://doi.org/10.3897/alpento.10.193434
The beta release of an innovative collaborative stand-alone authoring tool transforms manuscript preparation with semantic enrichment and real-time collaboration capabilities.
Scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft Publishers announces the beta launch of ORPHO, a revolutionary online platform designed to streamline collaborative scientific writing and produce AI-ready, future-proof scholarly literature.
ORPHO presents a significant advancement in scholarly publishing technology, combining intuitive writing features with sophisticated semantic enrichment capabilities. The new platform builds upon Pensoft’s fifteen years of experience as a developer of semantic publishing infrastructure.
Key Features
Within a shared online workspace, researchers can start with built-in customisable templates, create their own or import an existing file. They can then team up with collaborators in real time using track changes, role-based user rights, inline comments, and document-level chat. More significantly, ORPHO automatically structures scientific content according to international publishing standards, making research outputs findable, discoverable, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) once published.
Unlike its predecessor, the ARPHA Writing Tool, ORPHO is available as a standalone real-time collaborative workspace decoupled from journals hosted on Pensoft’s ARPHA Publishing Platform. Once a manuscript is ready, authors receive AI-FAIR machine-readable content that can be formatted to meet multiple journal requirements at the click of a button.
The platform’s adaptability to domain-specific workflows is currently being piloted in biodiversity science. ORPHO integrates seamlessly with leading biodiversity data aggregators, including the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD) and PlutoF, via import and export facilities for structured data, making ORPHO particularly valuable for researchers handling taxonomic, ecological and biodiversity data.
ORPHO: A new intelligent workspace for scientific writing.
Why ORPHO?
The name draws inspiration from multiple sources which reflect the tool’s philosophy and heritage. Named after Orphium: a unique plant genus endemic to South Africa whose sole species (Orphium frutescens) is known as the sea rose, ORPHO reflects the platform’s distinctive nature, heritage, and core philosophy.
It also evokes Orpheus, the legendary musician of ancient Thrace whose home region, the Rhodopi Mountains, lies in present-day Bulgaria, where ORPHO’s developer, Pensoft, is headquartered. The name thus honours the tool’s origins whilst embodying the exceptional creative performance it enables.
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Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO of Pensoft, comments:
“We are well aware that researchers today face an overwhelming list of formatting requirements and technical demands in an AI-driven landscape. It is true that rapid technological advancement presents both immense opportunities and mounting complexities for researchers.
We built ORPHO to remove that friction by offering an intuitive, collaborative workspace that lets scientists focus on their research. As a scientific publisher, our mission is to make scholarly publishing a seamless, rewarding experience fit for the modern age.”
The beta release invites researchers, institutions and publishing platforms to trial ORPHO and provide feedback. Access is available at orpho.net.
Pensoft has been awarded the Seal of Recognition for the FAO AGRIS Active Data Provider of the Year for 2027. The seal is granted by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations through its AGRIS initiative, and it recognises institutions that consistently share open-access agricultural research with the global community.
Notably, Pensoft joined the FAO AGRIS network back in 2024, and the organisation has renewed our seal every year since, a recognition we’re proud to have kept.
What has changed is the scale of our contribution. In 2024, Pensoft’s records on AGRIS numbered just under 15,000. Today, that figure has doubled to nearly 30,000, drawn from all 51 of our journals that fall within the scope of FAO AGRIS. The subjects covered are wide-ranging, spanning taxonomy, biodiversity, conservation and biogeography – these are all areas that feed directly into sustainable agriculture and natural resource management.
Through AGRIS, this research travels well beyond our own journals to researchers, policymakers and practitioners worldwide, adding to the shared pool of open knowledge that supports global food security and environmental sustainability. We’re glad to keep contributing to that effort, and look forward to continuing our work with FAO AGRIS in the years to come.
About FAO
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is a specialised agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger. Its goal is to achieve food security for all, ensuring that people have regular access to enough high-quality food to lead active, healthy lives. With 194 members, 193 countries and the European Union, FAO works in over 130 countries worldwide.
About Pensoft
Founded in 1992 “by scientists, for scientists,” Pensoft is an academic open-access publishing company well known worldwide for its cutting-edge publishing tools, workflows and methods for text and data publishing of journals, books and conference materials. In 2010, Pensoft became the first scientific publisher to introduce semantic enrichments in scholarly publications. Through its Research and Technical Development department, the company is involved in a range of research and technology projects.
This research challenges the widely held assumption that temperature niche is the primary force shaping the elevational distribution of mountain butterflies.
A new study published in the open-access journal Alpine Entomology has found that alpine butterflies in the Swiss National Park are closely matching the pace of local warming in their range shift to higher elevations.
Analysing a recent butterfly survey, the research team found that the proportions of available habitat types explained close to half of all variation in butterfly communities, while elevation on its own accounted for only a small fraction of the difference. The finding challenges the widely held assumption that temperature niche is the primary force shaping the elevational distribution of mountain butterflies.
Lead researcher Korbinian Schrauth, of the Chair of Conservation Biology and Forest Ecology at the University of Würzburg, explained what first prompted the team’s hypothesis:
“The common assumption is that temperature adaptation is the main driving force behind the elevational distribution of butterflies in the Alps. But there are a few cases that appear to be contradictory to this assumption.”
He cited the Peak White, a high-alpine butterfly, which has established colonies on lowland gravel banks, after its high-alpine host plants arrived there via alluvial deposits carried down from higher elevations:
“This and similar examples led us to suspect that the elevational distribution of alpine butterflies might be rather driven by available habitats than by temperatures.”
When the results came in, even the researchers were taken aback by how decisively habitats outweighed elevation as an independent explanatory factor.
“At first we were surprised that the amount of variance explained by elevation on its own was that small, but in the end, it fits quite well with our initial considerations and makes perfect sense given the knowledge of the complex ecology of butterflies.”
The study also found that butterfly communities have become measurably more warm-adapted over the past two decades. This shift was least pronounced at high elevations, which still appear to be dominated by cold-adapted alpine species.
At the same time, the average upslope displacement since 2004 corresponded closely to what would be expected from the local warming recorded in the region, suggesting that butterflies overall are keeping pace with the warming climate.
Not all species are faring equally well, however. Those restricted to a narrow range of habitat types showed markedly stronger upward shifts than generalist species, pointing to a particular vulnerability among alpine specialists. As vegetation struggles to keep pace with rising temperatures, specialist butterflies face the added risk of elevational butterfly-hostplant mismatches.
According to Schrauth, the conservation implications are significant:
“One of the implications of our study is that, besides reducing carbon emissions, the protection of alpine habitats is the most important measure for preserving the diversity of alpine butterflies.”
To keep track of future changes, the authors recommend repeating the surveys in the Swiss National Park at roughly ten-year intervals, though Schrauth acknowledged that more frequent monitoring would be preferable.
Original source:
Schrauth K, Plattner M, Müller J, Pellet J (2026) Habitat availability shapes composition and climate change response of alpine butterfly communities. Alpine Entomology 10: 121-135. https://doi.org/10.3897/alpento.10.186978
Cover image:
Butterflies gathering at damp areas of the ground to take up nutrients; such gatherings can give a quick insight into the composition and diversity of alpine butterfly communities. Credit: Korbinian Schrauth.
The crowd is roaring, the floodlights are blinding, and the pitch is absolutely pristine. Football fans and nature enthusiasts, welcome to our pre-match build-up!
We are just days away from the kickoff of the biggest show on Earth. That’s right, the 2026 FIFA World Cup is commencing soon, and it is already breaking all the records. This year, we are looking at a historic 23rd edition of the tournament, running from June 11 to July 19, 2026. For the first time in history, three powerhouse nations – the United States, Mexico, and Canada – are teaming up to host across 16 spectacular cities.
But hold onto your hats, because at Pensoft, we are launching our very own tournament to run right alongside the World Cup. While the world’s best footballers are battling it out on the grass, we are hosting an equally fierce competition.
We’ve scouted our journals, drafted the top talent, and placed different incredible species into a head-to-head knockout tournament.
This biodiversity battle will rage throughout the World Cup season, with the grand finale taking place on the same week as the final. But who will lift the ultimate trophy of public affection? Only you can decide…
The Match Schedule: How to play your part
We need you, the fans, to act as the referee! Here is how the tournament layout looks:
Thursday kickoff: Every Thursday, head over to our Instagram page where the latest head-to-head match will go live on our stories. You’ll have 24 hours to cast your vote in our poll for the species you want to win.
Monday post-match analysis: Every Monday, we will announce who won their corresponding match on our Instagram Story.
Consider this your ultimate pre-match scouting report. While you’re backing your favorite species to lift the trophy, you’ll also get the inside track on some of the most fascinating species described in our journals.
Tournament disclaimer
Before we kick-off, it is noteworthy that this tournament is purely for entertainment and a bit of good-natured fun. Narrowing down our roster to just 16 species was tough and we acknowledge that we’ve left some spectacular creatures on the bench.
To ensure total fairness and transparency, our selection was based on the latest 2026 Altmetric data. This system tracks online mentions across news media, blogs, and social networks for articles published in Pensoft journals from 2010 onward.
We did our best to diversify the list as much as possible in terms of taxonomic groups. However, due to the visual-centric nature of social media, we gave preference to immediately attractive species.
Are you ready for the whistle?
Make sure you are following our Instagram page so you don’t miss out!
In November 2025, Pensoft’s Chief Communications Officer, Teodor Metodiev, crossed the Atlantic to represent the publisher at two entomology events in Portland, Oregon: the Entomological Collections Network (ECN) Annual Meeting (8–9 November) and the Entomology 2025 conference (9–12 November).
Entomological Collections Network Annual Meeting
Held at the Hyatt Regency in Portland, the ECN 2025 annual meeting brought together professionals dedicated to the care, management, and use of entomological collections. The hybrid event featured live talks, pre-recorded lightning presentations and a silent auction in support of collection initiatives.
Pensoft’s stand at the ECN meeting.
Natural History Collections and Museomics featured prominently at the event.
Deborah Paul, one of the Editors-in-Chief for Natural History Collections and Museomics, with Teodor Metodiev.
At ECN 2025, Pensoft spotlighted its journals in entomology, particularly the newly launched diamond open-access journal Natural History Collections and Museomics (NHCM), which welcomes research on the preservation, digitisation and analysis of natural history collections. Building on last year’s successful collaboration, the meeting again highlighted the Topical Collection “Entomological Outreach Collections and Community Engagement,” published in NHCM and inspired by the 2024 ECN programme.
Entomology 2025
Pensoft joined more than 3,200 insect science professionals at the Entomological Society of America’s annual meeting, Entomology 2025 (Ento2025), hosted at the Oregon Convention Center. Over four days, the conference offered symposia, workshops, networking sessions, mixers and a busy exhibit hall.
Pensoft showcased the EU pollinator projects VALOR and AGRI4POL at Entomology 2025.
Pensoft exhibited at booth #715, showcasing the publisher’s portfolio of entomology journals and promoting two key EU-funded projects on pollinators: VALOR and AGRI4POL. Featuring professional scientific illustrations, attractive open-access publishing opportunities, and results from Pensoft-partnered EU projects, the booth attracted considerable interest from attendees.
A highlight of Pensoft’s presence at Entomology 2025 was the participation of Lars Straub, Editor-in-Chief of the newly launched Diamond Open Access journal Advances in Pollinator Research (APR). Straub moderated two student 10-minute presentation competitions and presented his own research, “Neonicotinoid exposure reduces fitness of a widespread butterfly, Vanessa cardui.”
Dr Alfred Daniel Johnson, a Journal of Hymenoptera Research author.
Dr Kevin Li, a One Ecosystem author.
Dr Claire Rutledge, a NeoBiota author.
Dr Lars Straub, Editor-in-Chief of Advances in Pollinator Research .
Dr Priyadarshini Chakrabarti Basu, an Advances in Pollinator Research editor.
Dr Yihang Li, a ZooKeys author.
Dr Jose ‘Joe’ Martinez, a ZooKeys author.
Yeshwanth, H M, a ZooKeys author.
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Following a fantastic week in Portland at both ECN 2025 and Entomology 2025, Pensoft looks forward to continuing its close collaboration with the entomological and collections communities. The Entomological Society of America’s next annual meeting, Entomology 2026, will take place on 8–11 November in Columbus, Ohio, where Pensoft plans to create more partnerships and continue its support for open science in insect research.
European Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) are generally considered well-known and thoroughly researched. Nevertheless, researchers discover new species every year; most of which are inconspicuous, so-called ‘cryptic’ species, previously overlooked.
Colourful species, on the other hand, have been largely catalogued in Europe as they attract a lot of attention, which made the surprise and delight at the discovery of an extraordinarily striking, and previously unnamed, moth all the greater.
Ingrid-Maria’s carcina (Carcina ingridmariae). Credit: Peter Huemer/Ferdinandeum.
A newly discovered, pink species has now been named Carcina ingridmariae by Peter Huemer, a scientist at the Tyrolean State Museum Ferdinanduem (Innsbruck, Austria). Huemer published his discovery in the open-access journal Alpine Entomology.
According to current knowledge, the moth is widespread in the eastern Mediterranean region: distributed from Croatia across large parts of Greece and Cyprus to Turkey. However, more detailed studies on its distribution are still pending.
Seemingly unmistakable
Ingrid-Maria’s carcina belongs to a species-poor group of butterflies. In Europe, there is only one other species of the same genus, the oak carcina (Carcina quercana).
The oak carcina (Carcina quercana). Credit: mazzeip via iNaturalist.
This widespread moth was described as early as 1775 by the famous naturalist Johann Christian Fabricius based on specimens from Saxony, and is distributed from North Africa across large parts of Europe to the Balkans.
Due to its unusual colour, the species has always been considered unmistakable. In fact, it is so popular even among amateur researchers that it adorns the cover of an important British identification book.
But, hiding in plain sight, was a second species, mistaken for the oak carcina for more than 100 years.
As a result of its apparent unmistakability, Carcina ingridmariae was always misidentified and was first published – incorrectly – as the oak wood carcina from Crete in 1916.
Habitat of Carcinaingridmariae in north Cyprus (eastern part of Five Finger Mountains near Kantara). Credit: Peter Huemer/Ferdinandeum.
It was only the introduction of new molecular identification methods that put researchers at the Ferdinandeum on the trail of the nameless moth. DNA barcodes, also known as genetic fingerprints, showed huge differences of more than 6% between the two species.
Subsequent morphological examination of the sexual organs led to the famous “wow” effect. And, upon closer inspection, the two species could not be confused at all, despite the confusingly similar external appearance of the species: namely, a wingspan of about 2 centimeters, a pink base colour with yellow spots, and strikingly long antennae.
A special gift for a 42nd wedding anniversary
Peter Huemer has described more than 200 species from Europe in 35 years, but is particularly enthusiastic about this new species. He said: “It is without doubt the prettiest species I have encountered in my long scientific career, even though it was still unnamed.”
It was therefore obvious to Huemer that he should dedicate the new species to his wife, Ingrid Maria, on their 42nd wedding anniversary. The researcher justifies this choice of name above all with his wife’s decades of support for his work.
Original source
Huemer P (2025) The supposedly unmistakable mistaken: Carcina ingridmariae sp. nov., a surprising example of overlooked diversity from Europe and the Near East (Lepidoptera, Peleopodidae). Alpine Entomology 9: 51-63. https://doi.org/10.3897/alpento.9.158239
The initiative aims to make it easier to access and use biodiversity data associated with published research, aligning with principles of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data.
The data portals offer seamless integration of published articles and associated data elements with GBIF-mediated records. Now, researchers, educators, and conservation practitioners can discover and use the extensive species occurrence and other data associated with the papers published in each journal.
A video displaying an interactive map with occurrence data on the BDJ portal.
The collaboration between Pensoft and GBIF was recently piloted with the Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ). Today, the BDJ hosted portal provides seamless access and exploration for nearly 300,000 occurrences of biological organisms from all over the world that have been extracted from the journal’s all-time publications. In addition, the portal provides direct access to more than 800 datasets published alongside papers in BDJ, as well as to almost 1,000 citations of the journal articles associated with those publications.
“The release of the BDJ portal and subsequent ones planned for other Pensoft journals should inspire other publishers to follow suit in advancing a more interconnected, open and accessible ecosystem for biodiversity research,” said Dr. Vince Smith, Editor-in-Chief of BDJ and head of digital, data and informatics at the Natural History Museum, London.
— GBIF @biodiversity.social/@gbif (@GBIF) March 10, 2025
“The programme will provide a scalable solution for more than thirty of the journals we publish thanks to our partnership with Plazi, and will foster greater connectivity between scientific research and the evidence that supports it,” said Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder and chief executive officer of Pensoft.
On the new portals, users can search data, refining their queries based on various criteria such as taxonomic classification, and conservation status. They also have access to statistical information about the hosted data.
Together, the hosted portals provide data on almost 325,000 occurrence records, as well as over 1,000 datasets published across the journals.
If you follow any of Pensoft’s social media accounts, you will know that we have been counting down our top 10 favourite species described as new-to-science in our journals this year.
The list is—of course—entirely arbitrary, but it is also a fun way to look back on a year in which several weird and wonderful animals, plants and fungi were discovered.
In this blog post, we will tell you more about each species, share some honourable mentions, and reveal our number 1 spot!
Honourable mentions
The league of legends crab
Gothus teemo and Teemo.
When it was time to name a tiny, ‘furry’ new species of gorilla crab from China, researchers drew unlikely inspiration from the video game League of Legends.
Gothus teemo was named after the character Teemo thanks to its distinctive appearance and has drawn a lot of attention from fans of the franchise.
The new species is thought to have resembled a modern sandtiger shark (pictured).
Calling anything on this list a ‘new species’ is not accurate—rather, they are just new to published science. Nothing exemplifies this more than Palaeohypotodus bizzocoi, a long-extinct shark species that lived 65 million years ago, shortly after the fall of the dinosaurs.
What makes this discovery remarkable is that it was partially accidental. Find out how a 100-year-old box of teeth in Alabama led to the discovery of this ancient shark below.
Sometimes, it is the way in which a new species is discovered that makes it so special.
Such is the case for Schiedea waiahuluensis, a carnation species from Hawaii that is likely the first plant to be identified and collected using drone technology. Learn all about it below!
With its all-black colouration, Tylototriton gaowangjienensis, a crocodile newt from China, has drawn comparisons to Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon.
However, this alluring amphibian hides flashes of orange beneath its tail and toes! Find more pictures and information below.
Besides its adorable appearance, Hoplitis onosmaevae is remarkable due to its distribution. It is currently only known from a small region of the French Alps, and areas >2,000 km away in the mountains of Turkey and Iraq.
Another interesting aspect of Hoplitis onosmaevae is its specialised ecological niche: it is thought to only collect pollen from Onosma species. This narrow ecological niche makes it vulnerable to factors like climate change and changes in agricultural practices.
John L. Clark with Amalophyllon miraculum. Credit @phinaea on Instagram.
The discovery of Amalophyllon miraculum—in an area assumed to be a barren agricultural landscape of plant extinctions—represents an inspiration for biodiversity conservation. This “miracle” plant, as its name suggests, was found surviving in one of the small, isolated forest fragments that remain in the Centinela region of western Ecuador.
This spiky amphibian was discovered on Cerro Candelaria, a mountain in the Tungurahua province. The discovery of this new species in the upper Rio Pastaza watershed suggests this area might be a centre of rapid evolution for these fascinating frogs.
Entomologists and citizen scientists teamed up to discover this new species of flea beetle in the lush rainforests of Borneo. The discovery was made during a Taxon Expeditions trip, where non-scientist people got the chance to work alongside scientists to identify and describe new species.
What makes this discovery particularly exciting is the beetle’s size—it’s actually one of the largest among its relatives! Flea beetles that live in the leaf litter of tropical forests are typically much smaller, and as a result, we know very little about their ecology and diversity.
Discovered in the Red Sea, the ‘grumpy dwarf goby’ (Sueviota aethon) was published as a new species in ZooKeys. You can probably guess how it earned its name! This tiny fish, measuring less than 2 centimetres long, sports a permanent frown thanks to its large canines and fierce expression. Despite its small size, the grumpy dwarfgoby is thought to be a fearsome predator in its coral reef habitat.
Thismia malayanais a mycoheterotrophic plant, meaning it doesn’t photosynthesise. Instead, it acts as a parasite, stealing carbon resources from the fungi on its roots!
By stealing nutrients from fungi, it can thrive in the low-light conditions of dense forest understories where its highly specialised flowers are pollinated by fungus gnats and other small insects.
While the Tiputini velvet worm—Oroperipatus tiputini—may look friendly, it is an accomplished hunter that shoots a sticky substance from a pair of glands to trap its prey. This “living fossil” is a rare and unique invertebrate that evolved over 500 million years ago. The new species was discovered in the Ecuadorian Amazon at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station, which is part of the Yasuní Biosphere Reserve.
They say that life imitates art, and this new gecko species proves that to be true! Researchers in India have discovered a gecko with such a unique and beautiful colouration that they named it after painter Vincent van Gogh. The “Starry Night” gecko, or Cnemaspis vangoghi, was discovered in the Southern Western Ghats and stands out due to the male’s yellow head and forebody with light blue spots on the back, a striking combination reminiscent of the famous painting.
Yet another hectic year has passed for our team at Pensoft, so it feels right to look back at the highlights from the last 12 months, as we buckle up for the leaps and strides in 2025.
In the past, we have used the occasion to take you back to the best moments of our most popular journals (see this list of 2023 highlights from ZooKeys, MycoKeys, PhytoKeys and more!); share milestones related to our ARPHA publishing platform (see the new journals, integrations and features from 2023); or let you reminisce about the coolest research published across our journals during the year(check out our Top 10 new species from 2021).
In 2022, when we celebrated our 30th anniversary on the academic scene, we extended our festive spirit throughout the year as we dived deep into those fantastic three decades. We put up Pensoft’s timeline and finished the year with a New Species Showdown tournament, where our followers on (what was back then) Twitter voted twice a week for their favourite species EVER described on the pages of our taxonomic journals.
Spoiler alert: we will be releasing our 2024 Top 10 New Species on Monday, 23 December, so you’d better go to the right of this screen and subscribe to our blog!
As we realised we might’ve been a bit biased towards our publishing activities over the years, this time, hereby, we chose to present you a retrospection that captures our best 2024 moments from across the departments, and shed light on how the publishing, technology and project communication endeavours fit together to make Pensoft what it is.
In truth, we take pride in being an exponentially growing family of multiple departments that currently comprises over 60 full-time employees and about a dozen freelancers working from all corners of the world, including Australia, Canada, Belgium and the United Kingdom. Together, we are all determined to make sure we continuously improve our service to all who have trusted us: authors, reviewers, editors, client journals, learned societies, research institutions, project consortia and other external collaborators.
After all, great deeds are only possible when you team up with great like-minded people!
In 2024, at Pensoft, we were hugely pleased to see a significant growth in the published output at almost all our journals, including record-breaking numbers in both submissions and publications at flagship titles of ours, including the Biodiversity Data Journal, PhytoKeys and MycoKeys.
Later in 2024, our colleagues, who work together with our clients to ensure their journals comply with the requirements of the top scholarly databases before they apply for indexation, informed us that another two journals in our portfolio have had their applications to Clarivate’s Web of Science successfully accepted. These are the newest journal of the International Association of Vegetation Science: Vegetation and Classification, and Metabarcoding and Metagenomics: a journal we launched in 2017 in collaboration with a team of brilliant scientists working together at the time within the DNAquaNet COST Action.
In 2024, we also joined the celebrations of our long-time partners at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, whose three journals: Zoosystematics and Evolution, Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift and Fossil Record are all part of our journal portfolio. This year marked the 10th Open Access anniversary of the three journals.
In the meantime, we also registered a record in new titles either joining the Pensoft portfolio or opting for ARPHA Platform’s white-label publishing solution, where journal owners retain exclusivity for the publication of their titles, yet use ARPHA’s end-to-end technology and as many human-provided services as necessary.
Pensoft’s CEO and founder Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev with Prof. Dr. Marc Stadler, Editor-in-Chief of IMA Fungus and President of the International Mycological Association at the Pensoft booth at the 12th International Mycological Congress (August, the Netherlands).
Amongst our new partners are the International Mycological Association who moved their official journal IMA Fungus to ARPHA Platform. As part of Pensoft’s scholarly portfolio, the renowned journal joins another well-known academic title in the field of mycology: MycoKeys, which was launched by Pensoft in 2011. The big announcement was aptly made public at this year’s 12th International Mycological Congress where visitors of the Pensoft stand could often spot newly elected IMA President and IMA Fungus Chief editor: Marc Stadler chatting with our founder and CEO Lyubomir Penev by the Pensoft/MycoKeys booth.
On our end, we did not stop supporting enthusiastic and proactive scientists in their attempt to bridge gaps in scientific knowledge. In January, we launched the Estuarine Management and Technologies journal together with Dr. Soufiane Haddout of the Ibn Tofail University, Morocco.
Later on, Dr. Franco Andreone (Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali, Italy) sought us with the idea to launch a journal addressing the role of natural history museums and herbaria collections in scientific progress. This collaboration resulted in the Natural History Collections and Museomics journal, officially announced at the joint TDWG-SPNHC conference in Okinawa, Japan in August.
Around this time, we finalised our similarly exciting journal project in partnership with Prof. Dr. Volker Grimm (UFZ, Germany), Prof. Dr. Karin Frank (UFZ, Germany), Prof. Dr. Mark E. Hauber (City University of New York) and Prof. Dr. Florian Jeltsch (University of Potsdam, Germany). The outcome of this collaboration is called Individual-based Ecology: a journal that aims to promote an individual-based perspective in ecology, as it closes the knowledge gap between individual-level responses and broader ecological patterns.
The three newly-launched journals are all published under the Diamond Open Access model, where neither access, nor publication is subject to charges.
As you can see, we have a lot to be proud of in terms of our journals. This is also why in 2024 our team took a record number of trips to attend major scientific events, where we got the chance to meet face-to-face with long-time editors, authors, reviewers and readers of our journals. Even more exciting was meeting the new faces of scientific research and learning about their own take on scholarship and academic journals.
Pensoft’s CEO and founder Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev welcomed editors at PhytoKeys to the Pensoft-PhytoKeys-branded booth at the XX International Botanical Congress in July 2024 (Spain).
We cannot possibly comment on Pensoft’s tech progress in 2024 without mentioning the EU-funded project BiCIKL (acronym for Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library) that we coordinated for three years ending up last April.
This 36-month endeavour saw 14 member institutions and 15 research infrastructures representing diverse actors from the biodiversity data realm come together to improve bi-directional links between different platforms, standards, formats and scientific fields.
Following these three years of collaborative work, we reported a great many notable research outputs from our consortium (find about them in the open-science project collection in the Research Ideas and Outcomes journal, titled “Towards interlinked FAIR biodiversity knowledge: The BiCIKL perspective”) that culminated in the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub: a one-stop portal that allows users to access FAIR and interlinked biodiversity data and services in a few clicks; and also a set of policy recommendations addressing key policy makers, research institutions and funders who deal with various types of data about the world’s biodiversity, and are thereby responsible to ensuring there findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability (FAIR-ness).
Apart from coordinating BiCIKL, we also worked side-by-side with our partners to develop, refine and test each other’s tools and services, in order to make sure that they communicate efficiently with each other, thereby aligning with the principles of FAIR data and the needs of the scientific community in the long run.
During those three years we made a lot of refinements to our OpenBiodiv: a biodiversity database containing knowledge extracted from scientific literature, built as an Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System, and our ARPHA Writing Tool. The latter is an XML-based online authoring environment using a large set of pre-formatted templates, where manuscripts are collaboratively written, edited and submitted to participating journals published on ARPHA Platform. What makes the tool particularly special is its multiple features that streamline and FAIRify data publishing as part of a scientific publication, especially in the field of biodiversity knowledge. In fact, we made enough improvements to the ARPHA Writing Tool that we will be soon officially releasing its 2.0 version!
OpenBiodiv – The Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System
ARPHA Writing Tool 2.0
Amongst our collaborative projects are the Nanopublications for Biodiversity workflow that we co-developed with KnowledgePixels to allow researchers to ‘fragment’ their most important scientific findings into machine-actionable and machine-interpretable statements. Being the smallest units of publishable information, these ‘pixels of knowledge’ present an assertion about anything that can be uniquely identified and attributed to its author and serve to communicate a single statement, its original source (provenance) and citation record (publication info).
Nanopublications for Biodiversity
In partnership with the Swiss-based Text Mining group of Patrick Ruch at SIB and the text- and data-mining association Plazi, we brought the SIB Literature Services (SIBiLS) database one step closer to solidifying its “Biodiversity PMC” portal and working title.
Understandably, we spent a lot of effort, time and enthusiasm in raising awareness about our most recent innovations, in addition to our long-standing workflows, formats and tools developed with the aim to facilitate open and efficient access to scientific data; and their integration into published scholarly work, as well as receiving well-deserved recognition for their collection.
We just can’t stress it enough how important and beneficial it is for everyone to have high-quality FAIR data, ideally made available within a formal scientific publication!
🗨️Imagine if ALL these links were provided as hyperlinks within a #scholarly publication!
Pensoft’s CTO Teodor Georgiev talks about innovative methods and good practices in the publication of biodiversity data in scholarly papers at the First national meeting of the Bulgarian Barcode of Life (BgBOL) consortium (December, Bulgaria).
🤔What is a Data Paper?
👍 A means to describe a #dataset – like the ones on @GBIF – in a standardised, widely accepted #scientific article format.
👇🧵Highlights from @LyuboPenev's talk at the int'l symposium "#BiodiversityData in montane & arid Eurasia" in Kazakhstan 🇰🇿
Pensoft’s CEO and founder Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev presenting his “Data papers on biodiversity” talk at the “Biodiversity data in montane and arid Eurasia” symposium jointly organized by GBIF and by the Institute of Zoology of Republic of Kazakhstan (November, Kazakhstan).
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📸Today, at the @EASEeditors symposium, our @teodorpensoft gave a sneak peek into the AI-assisted tools at @ARPHAplatform we have been working on (e.g. Word -> JATS XML conversion) and the #ARPHA Writing Tool 2.0 (coming up in early 2025)!🎉
Pensoft’s CTO Teodor Georgiev presents new features and workflows currently in testing at the ARPHA Writing Tool 2.0 at the EASE Autumn Symposium 2024 (online event).Pensoft’s Head of Journal development, Marketing and PR Iva Boyadzhieva talks about Pensoft’s data publishing approach and innovations at the German Ecological Society 53rd Annual Conference (September, Germany).
Pensoft as a science communicator
At our Project team, which is undoubtedly the fastest developing department at Pensoft, science communicators are working closely with technology and publishing teams to help consortia bring their scientific results closer to policy actors, decision-makers and the society at large.
Ultimately, bridging the notorious chasm between researchers and global politics boils down to mutual understanding and dialogue.
Pensoft’s communication team attended COP16 (November 2024, Colombia) along with partners at the consortia of CO-OP4CBD, BioAgora and RESPIN: three Horizon Europe projects, whose communication and dissemination is led by Pensoft.
Throughout 2024, the team, comprising 20 science communicators and project managers, has been working as part of 27 EU-funded project consortia, including nine that have only started this year (check out all partnering projects on the Pensoft website, ordered from most recently started to oldest). Apart from communicating key outcomes and activities during the duration of the projects, at many of the projects, our team has also been actively involved in their grant proposal drafting, coordination, administration, platform development, graphic and web design and others (see all project services offered by Pensoft to consortia).
📸As leaders of the “Stakeholder engagement, comms & dissemination” WP at @BCubedProject, we joined the annual meeting to report on project branding, #scicomm & #DataManagement.
Naturally, we had a seat on the front row during many milestones achieved by our partners at all those 27 ongoing projects, and communicated to the public by our communicators.
Amongst those are the release of the InsectsCount web application developed within the Horizon 2020 project SHOWCASE. Through innovative gamification elements, the app encourages users to share valuable data about flower-visiting insects, which in turn help researchers gain new knowledge about the relationship between observed species and the region’s land use and management practices (learn more about InsectsCount on the SHOWCASE prroject website).
Another fantastic project output was the long-awaited dataset of maps of annual forest disturbances across 38 European countries derived from the Landsat satellite data archive published by the Horizon Europe project ForestPaths in April (find more about the European Forest Disturbance Atlas on the ForestPaths project website).
In a major company highlight, last month, our project team participated in COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan with a side event dedicated to the role of open science and science communication in climate- and biodiversity-friendly policy.
Pensoft’s participation at COP29 – as well as our perspective on FAIR data and open science – were recently covered in an interview by Exposed by CMD (a US-based news media accredited to cover the event) with our science communicator Alexandra Korcheva and project manager Boris Barov.
You see, A LOT of great things worth celebrating happened during the year for us at Pensoft: all thanks to ceaselessly flourishing collaboration based on transparency, trust and integrity. Huge ‘THANK YOU!’ goes to everyone who has joined us in our endeavours!
Here’s to many more shared achievements coming up in 2025!
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