Category: Herpetozoa

Here’s to a year of growing and succeeding together!

Within and beyond our Pensoft team, we celebrate a year of well-nourished partnerships and excitement for the future

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!

Pensoft as an open-access academic publisher 

Pensoft’s stand at the 2024 TDWG-SPNHC joint conference (September, Japan).

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. 

Other fantastic news came in June from our Indexing team, who confirmed that One Ecosystem: a quite unique and novel academic outlet we launched in collaboration with the Ecosystem Services Partnership in 2016 – received its first Impact Factor. 

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.

10 years of Open Access: Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and Pensoft celebrate a decade of partnership

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.

Other partners who chose the services of ARPHA Platform for their journals in 2024 include the International Biogeography Society, United Arab Emirates University and Medical University Pleven.

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.

Natural History Collections and Museomics launches with its inaugural editorial

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.

ARPHA Platform welcomes new journal launched by Pensoft: Individual-based Ecology

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).

In 2024, we presented our journals and publishing opportunities at about 20 scientific forums, including the XX International Botanical Congress (July, Spain), the 12th International Mycological Congress (August, the Netherlands), the 10th World Congress of Herpetology (August, Malaysia) and the XXVII International Congress of Entomology (August, Japan).

Pensoft as a scientific technology provider

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).

The Biodiversity Knowledge Hub
Visit the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub: the main product of the BiCIKL consortium at: https://biodiversityknowledgehub.eu/.

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.

Towards the “Biodiversity PMC”: a literature database supporting advanced content queries

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!    

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).
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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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).

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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Uniting to advance amphibian and reptile conservation: the 10th World Congress of Herpetology

At the event, the Pensoft team met up with authors and editors, showcased its new communication materials, and sponsored a Best Talk award.

The 10th World Congress of Herpetology (WCH) took place on August 5-9, 2024, in Kuching, Malaysia. Maria Kolesnikova, Pensoft’s marketing and sales manager, attended the event, connecting with many current and prospective authors and editors at Pensoft journals.

Maria Kolesnikova standing at Pensoft's booth.

Throughout the congress, our stand attracted numerous visitors, including many editors of our journals, such as Herpetozoa and ZooKeys. The opportunity to connect with our editors in person was invaluable, reinforcing the collaborative spirit that drives our publishing efforts. In addition, many of the authors in our journal visited the Pensoft stand to see their papers in print.

  • Bibiana Rojas, subject editor at Herpetozoa
  • Luciano Javier Avila, subject editor at Biodiversity Data Journal
  • Luis Ceríaco, author and editor at ZooKeys
  • Anthony Herrel, subject editor at ZooKeys
  • Mao-Liang Li, author at Herpetozoa
  • Ilse K. Barraza-Soltero, author at ZooKeys, Herpetozoa, and Check List
  • Artem Lisachov, subject editor at Comparative Cytogenetics and author at Biodiversity Data Journal and Herpetozoa

Many of our editors participated actively in the congress, delivering talks that highlighted cutting-edge research in herpetology.

Luis Ceríaco, author and editor at ZooKeys, presented a talk called “The herpetological results of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira’s ‘Philosophical Voyage’ to Brazil (1783–1792)”, where he talked about a huge expedition to explore the Amazon and Cueva rivers.

Umilaela Arifin, subject editor at Zoosystematics and Evolution, delivered a presentation called, “Hang’in there! Toward stabilising phylogeny of Asian ranids with gastromyz ophorous tadpoles,” where she talked about Sumaterana, a new genus that has been identified with gastromyz tadpoles in Sumatra.

Ben Wielstra, subject editor at Herpetozoa, presented to a fully packed hall on the balanced lethal system in Triturus newts.

Hanh Thi Ngo, author at Nature Conservation, gave a talk called “Diversity of karst – adapted bent-toed geckos in Laos and Vietnam.” Karst diversity is in great danger because of human activities in Vietnam, she said. There are publications on this topic in ZK & Nature Conservation by Hanh and Ziegler.

Scientific illustrator Denitsa Peneva has designed Pensoft’s new communication materials, centered around rich, colourful illustrations of species that have been featured in Pensoft’s journals.

Swati Nawani, doctoral researcher at the Wildlife Institute of India, won one of Denitsa’s amazing scientific illustration prints as part of a raffle organised by Pensoft. Swati has researched Himalayan amphibians since 2018.

In a commitment to support and celebrate excellence in herpetological research, Pensoft sponsored the Best reptile conservation talk award. For her talk, “Heat water and reptiles – do the hydro-thermal properties of animals at the source location persist at the translocation site?,” Deanne Trewartha won a free publication in either Herpetozoa or Nature Conservation, as well as another beautiful print by Denitsa Peneva.

The award presentation was a moment of celebration, and we are delighted to support the work of such inspiring researchers.

For Pensoft, the 10th World Congress of Herpetology was a chance to connect with our authors and editors and engage with the global herpetology community. Inspired by all the quality research presented there, we look forward to the next Herpetology Congress – and until then, we will continue publishing and promoting outstanding scientific work.

Tug of war: two snakes battle for prey in a scientific first

Watch the incredible footage below.

Two red-tailed coral snakes have been observed competing over a caecilian in the first documented wild case of kleptoparasitism within the family Elapidae.

Kleptoparasitism, or food theft, is a well-documented behaviour in many animal species but is seldom reported among snakes in natural habitats.

Two Micrurus mipartitus snakes tugging prey in opposite directions. Credit: Henrik Bringsøe and Niels Poul Dreyer.

The observation, detailed in a recent study published in the open-access journal Herpetozoa by Henrik Bringsøe and Niels Poul Dreyer, showcases the two Micrurus mipartitus snakes engaging in a tug of war over the limbless amphibian.

Elapid snakes are venomous and among the deadliest serpents in the world. There are more than 400 species comprising a very diverse group of snakes such as mambas, cobras, kraits, taipans, tiger snakes, death adders, sea snakes and coral snakes.

Two snakes competing over prey.
The losing snake biting the body of the winning snake. Credit: Henrik Bringsøe and Niels Poul Dreyer.

The battle occurred in the dense rainforests of Valle del Cauca, western Colombia. Surprisingly, in the tussle, one snake also bit the body of the other. However, the researchers suggest this was likely accidental.

After 17 minutes of observation, the losing coral snake released its bite-hold on the caecilian. The winner then moved away from the losing snake which did not follow.

More footage of the battle. Credit: Henrik Bringsøe and Niels Poul Dreyer.

The study suggests that while such behaviours may be more common in captivity due to controlled environments, their occurrence in nature has been largely underreported, likely due to the elusive nature of these reptiles and the challenges of observing them in their natural habitats.

“Snakes in captivity do that often when only one prey is offered in a terrarium with two or more snakes. But it is rather surprising that it has not been observed more frequently in the wild.”

Henrik Bringsøe, lead author.

This case sheds light on the coral snake interactions with prey species. Caecilians, such as the one in this study, have shown remarkable adaptations such as toxin resistance and increased mucus production.

Henrik Bringsøe previously recorded snake feeding behaviour that was entirely new to science. Check out his guest blog post on the snakes that disembowel and feed on the organs of living toads.

Snake eating the organs of a toad. Credit: Winai Suthanthangjai.

Original source:

Bringsøe H, Dreyer NP (2024) Kleptoparasitism in Micrurus mipartitus (Squamata, Elapidae) competing for the same Caecilia sp. (Gymnophiona, Caeciliidae) in western Colombia. Herpetozoa 37: 77-84. https://doi.org/10.3897/herpetozoa.37.e112716

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Celebrating taxonomic discoveries: Top 10 new species of 2023

Get to know the most exciting new species published in Pensoft journals last year.

In 2023, the world of biodiversity saw some amazing discoveries . Our taxonomy journals published hundreds of new species, so selecting a Top Ten was tough, but here we go – get to know these beautiful new species, and maybe think about all the amazing diversity that still remains unexplored on our planet.

10. The walking leaf

It’s very often that undescribed species hide in plain sight for years, but it’s easy to understand why when they look like that! Leaf insects look confusingly similar to leaves – this sophisticated camouflage provides excellent protection from predators, but also presents a challenge to researchers.

“There are around 3,500 known species of stick and leaf insects and there are currently just over 100 described species of leaf insect,” researcher Dr Sven Bradler says. This is why when Phyllium ortizi and six other leaf insect species were found, it made for a really special discovery.

Lime-green in colour, Phyllium ortizi is so far only known from Mindanao Island, Philippines.

Published in ZooKeys.

9. The spiky hedgehog

The Eastern Forest Hedgehog (Mesechinus orientalis) was discovered in southwestern China. It is a small-bodied hedgehog, smaller than most of the other species in its genus, its spines as short as 1.8-2 cm. It has a brown nose, with black whiskers that shorten towards the nose.

The species is currently known from southern Anhui and northwestern Zhejiang, where it lives in scrubland and subtropical broad-leaf evergreen forests at elevations from 30 to 700 m.

The researchers found out that genus Mesechinus, to which the new species belongs, dates back to the early Pleistocene and started appearing around 1.71 million years ago, while M. Orientalis diverged from its congeners some 1.1 million years ago.

Published in ZooKeys.

8. The bumpy salamander

Tylototriton zaimeng was found in the eponymous Zaimeng lake in Manipur, India. It is a medium-sized salamander has a massive wide head that could take up as much as a quarter of its total length. Its most distinctive feature are the knob-like warts along its body.

The salamander has an earthy-brown body with orange markings along its head and orange-brown warts down its back and sides. Its tail fades from brown at the base to yellow-orange at the tip.

Even though it has just been discovered as a species for science, locals know a lot about it and have different names for it.

Because its known range is limited and threatened by deforestation and human interference, the species should be considered vulnerable.

Published in Herpetozoa.

7. The “groins of fire” frog

An unexpected discovery, this new treefrog species was found in the Amazon lowlands of central Peru. The research team, led by Germán Chávez, was surprised that a new species could be hiding in plain sight in an otherwise well-explored part of the Amazon. No matter how many times they returned to the site, they only found two specimens, which made its scientific description challenging.

Its name, Scinax pyroinguinis, literally means “groins of fire”. It is a reference to the orange, flame-like pattern on the groins, thighs and shanks, but also to the wildfires in the area where it was found, which are a serious threat to its habitat.

Published in Evolutionary Systematics.

6. The charming carnivore

Pinguicula ombrophila is part of the butterwort family, a group of insectivorous flowering plants consisting of around 115 species. Its leaves have a sticky texture, enabling it to capture and digest small insects.

For carnivorous plants, insects can be an additional source of nutrients to help them compensate the nutrient deficiency of the substrate they’re growing in. This gives them a competitive advantage over other plants and enables them to thrive in challenging habitats.

Two striking new species of carnivorous plants discovered in the Andes of Ecuador

While the majority of butterworts are found in the northern hemisphere, this species was discovered in the elevated regions of southern Ecuador, near the Peru border. The research team found it on a nearly vertical rock face at 2,900 metres. Its name means “rain-loving butterwort”, highlighting the plant’s preference for very wet conditions.

Published in PhytoKeys.

5. The unicorn fish

Sinocyclocheilus longicornus (from the Latin words “longus”, meaning long, and “cornu”, meaning horn) comes from Southern China. It is only known from a dark vertical cave at an elevation of 2,276 m in the province of Guizhou. It is around 10-15 centimeters long and lacks pigmentation in its scales, which gives it it a ghostly whitish appearance. Since its eyes are small and probably not much help in a completely dark environment, it relies on barbels that look like tiny whiskers to feel its way around.

The researchers that found it are not quite sure what its “horn” is used for, but it might have something to do with navigating its way in the dark and dreary environment it inhabits.

Sinocyclocheilus longicornus is also featured in the SHOALS report on freshwater fish species described in 2023.

Published in ZooKeys.

4. The DiCaprio snake

snake

Sibon irmelindicaprioae was described as a new species together with four more tree-dwelling snake species from jungles of Ecuador, Colombia, and Panama. They all belong to Dipsadinae —a subfamily of snakes found in North and South America.

Also known as DiCaprio’s snail-eating snake, this species was named after actor and film producer Leonardo DiCaprio’s mother, Irmelin DiCaprio. The actor himself chose the name to honour his mother and raise awareness about the threats these snakes face.

Its habitat in Panama is affected by large-scale copper mining. The open-pit mines, some of them visible from space, make the areas uninhabitable for snail-eating snakes.

“These new species of snake are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of new species discoveries in this region, but if illegal mining continues at this rate, there may not be an opportunity to make any future discoveries,” says Alejandro Arteaga, who led the study to describe them.

Published in ZooKeys.

3. The Tolkien frog

Frog

You probably guessed it by now – this stream frog from the Ecuadorian Andes was named after J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

At about 66 millimeters (2.5 inches) long, Hyloscirtus tolkieni is tiny enough to fit in the palm of your hand, but that doesn’t stop it from being simply stunning. With pale pink eyes and gold-speckled toes, it looks like it came straight out of Middle-earth. It was found at an elevation of 3190 meters in Río Negro-Sopladora National Park, a protected area of páramo and cloud forests.

“The new species of frog has amazing colours, and it would seem that it lives in a universe of fantasies, like those created by Tolkien. The truth is that the tropical Andes are magical ecosystems where some of the most wonderful species of flora, funga, and fauna in the world are present. Unfortunately, few areas are well protected from the negative impacts caused by humans. Deforestation, unsustainable agricultural expansion, mining, invasive species, and climate changes are seriously affecting Andean biodiversity”, said Diego F. Cisneros-Heredia, one of the researchers behind this discovery.

Published in ZooKeys.

2. The enigmatic Nautilus

2023 was a great year for nautilus biodiversity: three species were described as new to science, including Nautilus samoaensis, which you see here. Like its name tells you, it was found off the coast of American Samoa.

Studying nautilus diversity is no easy feat – with setting spiky traps, hauling them over on board, and, eventually, burping nautiluses, it is surely a memorable experience.

Judging by the fossil record, nautiloids were once quite plentiful throughout the oceans. Today, however, they are represented by just a handful of species.

In addition, these fragile animals remain threatened by wildlife trade as they are hunted for their shells, which according to Mongabay can sell for up to about $1,000 each on the black market.

This beautiful species was also featured in the World Register of Marine Species‘ selection of the top 10 marine species published in 2023, along with another ZooKeys species.

Published in ZooKeys.

1. The electric blue tarantula

Found in Thailand’s Phang-Nga province, Chilobrachys natanicharum features an enchanting phenomenon: a neon blue-purple coloration that gives it a unique look.

There is no blue pigment in this tarantula’s body: the secret behind its striking color comes from the unique structure of its hair, which incorporates nanostructures that manipulate light in an effect that creates the blue appearance. Depending on the light, it can also appear violet.

Before it was described as a new species, Chilobrachys natanicharum was actually known to experts from the commercial tarantula trade market as “Chilobrachys sp. Electric Blue Tarantula,” but this is the first time that it’s discovered in its natural habitat.

Its name, in fact, resulted from an auction campaign, the proceeds from the auction have been channeled to bolster the education of Lahu children in Thailand and to aid impoverished cancer patients.

Published in ZooKeys.

Towards the “Biodiversity PMC”: a literature database supporting advanced content queries

The indexing is one of the major outcomes from the partnerships within the Horizon 2020-funded project Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCIKL)

Amongst the major outcomes from the currently nearly completed Horizon 2020-funded project Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCIKL) – dedicated to making biodiversity data FAIR and bi-directionally linked – brings the SIB Literature Services (SIBiLS) database one step closer to solidifying its “Biodiversity PMC” portal and working title.

In a joint effort between the Swiss-based Text Mining group of Patrick Ruch at SIB (developing SIBiLS), the text- and data-mining association Plazi and scientific publisher Pensoft, the long-time collaborators have started feeding full-text content of over 500,000 taxonomic treatments extracted by Plazi and tens of thousands full-text articles from 40 well-renowned biodiversity journals published by Pensoft to the SIBiLS database. 

What this means is that users at SIBiLS – be it human or AI – have now gained access to advanced text- and data-mining tools, including AI-powered factoid question-answering capacities, to query all this full-text indexed content and seek out, for example, species traits and biotic interactions.

To index and directly feed the content from its 40+ academic outlets at SIBiLS, Pensoft relies on advanced and full-text TaxPub JATS XML journal publication workflow, powered by the ARPHA publishing platform. Meanwhile, Plazi uses its GoldenGate text- and data-mining software to harvest taxon treatments from over 80 journals stored at TreatmentBank and the Biodiversity Literature Repository, and then further re-used by GBIF, OpenBiodiv and now by SiBILS.

Seen as a pilot, the indexing – the partners believe – could soon be extended with other journals relying on modern publishing or converted legacy publications. 

In fact, ever since its launch in 2020, the queryable database SIBiLS has been retrieving relevant full-text papers directly from the NIH’s PubMed Central, including Pensoft’s ZooKeys, PhytoKeys, MycoKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal and Comparative Cytogenetics. 

However, there were still gaps left to bridge before SIBiLS could indeed be dubbed “the Biodiversity PMC”, and those have mostly been about volume and breadth of content. While the above-mentioned five journals by Pensoft had long been indexed by SIBiLS through harvesting PMC, those had been quite an exception since, several years ago, a reorganisation at PMC moved the focus of the database to almost exclusively biomedical content, thus leaving biodiversity journals out of the scope of the database.

In the meantime, while Plazi has been feeding SIBiLS a growing volume of taxonomic treatments and visual data, as it was exponentially increasing the number of publishers and journals it mined data from, a lot of biodiversity data (e.g. genetic, molecular, ecological) published in the article narratives that were not taxon treatments could not make it to the portal.

“We all know the advantages and practical uses PMC offers to its users, so we cannot miss the opportunity to incorporate this well-proven approach to navigate the data deluge in biodiversity science. Undoubtedly, it is an extremely ambitious and demanding task. Yet, I believe that, at the BiCIKL consortium, we have made it pretty clear we have the necessary expertise, know-how and aspiration to take on the challenge,”

said Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder/CEO at Pensoft and project coordinator of BiCIKL.

“For far too long, scientific knowledge about biodiversity has been imprisoned in a continuously growing corpus of scientific outputs, which – most of the time – are published in unstructured formats, such as PDF, or as paywalled content, and often locked by both! This means that they are – at best – difficult to access and comprehend by computer algorithms. In the meantime, we need all that knowledge, in order to accelerate our understanding of the dynamics of the global biodiversity crisis and to efficiently assess the impact of climate change. This is why the need for advanced workflows and tools to annotate, mine, query and discover new facts from the available literature is more than obvious,”

added Dr. Donat Agosti, President at Plazi.

“In the course of the BiCIKL project, at SIBiLS, we started indexing a larger set of biodiversity-related contents in the broad sense, including environmental sciences and ecology, to build a new literature database, or what we now call ‘Biodiversity PMC’. Now, with the help of Plazi and Pensoft, we provide a unique entry point to half a million taxonomic treatments, which were not included into the original PubMed Central. Next on the list is to expand our network of literature sources and continue this exponential growth of queryable biodiversity knowledge to turn Biodiversity PMC into the “One Health” library. We promise to keep you posted,”

said Dr. Patrick Ruch, Group Leader at SIB and Head of Research at HES-SO, HEG Geneva, Switzerland. 

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Follow BiCIKL Project on Twitter and Facebook. Join the conversation on Twitter at #BiCIKL_H2020.

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About the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics:

SIB is an internationally recognized non-profit organisation, dedicated to biological and biomedical data science. SIB’s data scientists are passionate about creating knowledge and solving complex questions in many fields, from biodiversity and evolution to medicine. They provide essential databases and software platforms as well as bioinformatics expertise and services to academic, clinical, and industry groups. With the recent creation of the Environmental Bioinformatics group, led by Robert Waterhouse, SIB is engaged in an unprecedented effort to streamline data across molecular biology, health and biodiversity. SIB also federates the Swiss bioinformatics community of some 900 scientists, encouraging collaboration and knowledge sharing.

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About Plazi:

Plazi is an association supporting and promoting the development of persistent and openly accessible digital taxonomic literature. To this end, Plazi maintains TreatmentBank, a digital taxonomic literature repository to enable archiving of taxonomic treatments; develops and maintains TaxPub, an extension of the National Library of Medicine / National Center for Biotechnology Informatics Journal Article Tag Suite for taxonomic treatments; is co-founder of the Biodiversity Literature Repository at Zenodo, participates in the development of new models for publishing taxonomic treatments in order to maximise interoperability with other relevant cyberinfrastructure components such as name servers and biodiversity resources; and advocates and educates about the vital importance of maintaining free and open access to scientific discourse and data. Plazi is a major contributor to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

Pensoft collaborates with R Discovery to elevate research discoverability

Pensoft and R Discovery’s innovative connection aims to change the way researchers find academic articles.

Leading scholarly publisher Pensoft has announced a strategic collaboration with R Discovery, the AI-powered research discovery platform by Cactus Communications, a renowned science communications and technology company. This partnership aims to revolutionize the accessibility and discoverability of research articles published by Pensoft, making them more readily available on R Discovery to its over three million researchers across the globe.

R Discovery, acclaimed for its advanced algorithms and an extensive database boasting over 120 million scholarly articles, empowers researchers with intelligent search capabilities and personalized recommendations. Through its innovative Reading Feed feature, R Discovery delivers tailored suggestions in a format reminiscent of social media, identifying articles based on individual research interests. This not only saves time but also keeps researchers updated with the latest and most relevant studies in their field.

Open Science is much more than cost-free access to research output.

Lyubomir Penev

One of R Discovery’s standout features is its ability to provide paper summaries, audio readings, and language translation, enabling users to quickly assess a paper’s relevance and enhance their research reading experience significantly.

With over 2.5 million app downloads and upwards of 80 million journal articles featured, the R Discovery database is one of the largest scholarly content repositories.

“At Pensoft, we do realise that Open Science is much more than cost-free access to research outputs. It is also about easier discoverability and reusability, or, in other words, how likely it is for the reader to come across a particular scientific publication and, as a result, cite and build on those findings in his/her own studies. By feeding the content of our journals into R Discovery, we’re further facilitating the discoverability of the research done and shared by the authors who trust us with their work,” said ARPHA’s and Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev.

Abhishek Goel, Co-Founder and CEO of Cactus Communications, commented on the collaboration, “We are delighted to work with Pensoft and offer researchers easy access to the publisher’s high-quality research articles on R Discovery. This is a milestone in our quest to support academia in advancing open science that can help researchers improve the world.”

So far, R Discovery has successfully established partnership with over 20 publishers, enhancing the platform’s extensive repository of scholarly content. By joining forces with R Discovery, Pensoft solidifies its dedication to making scholarly publications from its open-access, peer-reviewed journal portfolio easily discoverable and accessible.

Pensoft partners with ResearchGate to drive readership and visibility of open access journals

Content from 20 Pensoft journals will now be automatically added to ResearchGate to reach the research network’s 25 million users. Each journal will also receive a dedicated profile.

ResearchGate, the professional network for researchers, and Pensoft today announced a new partnership that will see a set of Pensoft’s open access journals increase their reach and visibility through ResearchGate – increasing access and engagement with its 25 million researcher members.  

Pensoft is a fully open access publisher, providing high-quality end-to-end services to its own and third-party scientific journals via its in-house developed scholarly publishing platform ARPHA.

As part of this new partnership, 20 journals published by Pensoft – including the publisher’s flagship titles ZooKeys, PhytoKeys, MycoKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal and Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO Journal) amongst others – will now have their content automatically added to ResearchGate upon publication to benefit from enhanced visibility and discoverability through ResearchGate’s innovative Journal Home offering. These journals will all have dedicated profiles and be prominently represented on all associated article pages on ResearchGate, as well as all other relevant touch points throughout the network.

Journal Home provides a unique opportunity for Pensoft to connect its authors with their readers. The new journal profiles on ResearchGate will provide a central location for each journal, enabling researchers to learn more, discover new article content, and understand how, through their network, they are connected to the journal’s community of authors and editors. Authors of these journals additionally benefit from having their articles automatically added to their ResearchGate profile page, giving them access to metrics, including who is reading and citing their research. These rich insights will also enable Pensoft to build a deeper understanding of the communities engaging with its journals. 

“Pensoft is delighted to be working with ResearchGate to provide an even greater service to our authors and readers. ResearchGate offers an innovative way for us to grow the reach and visibility of our content, while also giving us a way to better understand and engage our author and reader audiences.”

said Prof Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft.

“We couldn’t be happier to see Pensoft embark on this new partnership with ResearchGate. Journal Home will not only enable Pensoft authors to build visibility for their work, but provide them and Pensoft with greater insights about the communities engaging with that research. I look forward to seeing this new collaboration develop”

said Sören Hofmayer, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at ResearchGate.

About ResearchGate:

ResearchGate is the professional network for researchers. Over 25 million researchers use researchgate.net to share and discover research, build their networks, and advance their careers. Based in Berlin, ResearchGate was founded in 2008. Its mission is to connect the world of science and make research open to all.

Nanopublications tailored to biodiversity data

Novel nanopublication workflows and templates for associations between organisms, taxa and their environment are the latest outcome of the collaboration between Knowledge Pixels and Pensoft.

First off, why nanopublications?

Nanopublications complement human-created narratives of scientific knowledge with elementary, machine-actionable, simple and straightforward scientific statements that prompt sharing, finding, accessibility, citability and interoperability. 

By making it easier to trace individual findings back to their origin and/or follow-up updates, nanopublications also help to better understand the provenance of scientific data. 

With the nanopublication format and workflow, authors make sure that key scientific statements – the ones underpinning their research work – are efficiently communicated in both human-readable and machine-actionable manner in line with FAIR principles. Thus, their contributions to science are better prepared for a reality driven by AI technology.

The machine-actionability of nanopublications is a standard due to each assertion comprising a subject, an object and a predicate (type of relation between the subject and the object), complemented by provenance, authorship and publication information. A unique feature here is that each of the elements is linked to an online resource, such as a controlled vocabulary, ontology or standards. 

Now, what’s new?

As a result of the partnership between high-tech startup Knowledge Pixels and open-access scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft, authors in Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ) can make use of three types of nanopublications:

  1. Nanopublications associated with a manuscript submitted to BDJ. This workflow lets authors add a Nanopublications section within their manuscript while preparing their submission in the ARPHA Writing Tool (AWT). Basically, authors ‘highlight’ and ‘export’ key points from their papers as nanopublications to further ensure the FAIRness of the most important findings from their publications.
  1. Standalone nanopublication related to any scientific publication, regardless of its author or source. This can be done via the Nanopublications page accessible from the BDJ website. The main advantage of standalone nanopublication is that straightforward scientific statements become available and FAIR early on, and remain ready to be added to a future scholarly paper.
  1. Nanopublications as annotations to existing scientific publications. This feature is available from several journals published on the ARPHA Platform, including BDJ. By attaching an annotation to the entire paper (via the Nanopublication tab) or a text selection (by first adding an inline comment, then exporting it as a nanopublication), a reader can evaluate and record an opinion about any article using a simple template based on the Citation Typing Ontology (CiTO).

Nanopublications for biodiversity data?

At Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ), authors can now incorporate nanopublications within their manuscripts to future-proof the most important assertions on biological taxa and organisms or statements about associations of taxa or organisms and their environments. 

On top of being shared and archived by means of a traditional research publication in an open-access peer-reviewed journal, scientific statements using the nanopublication format will also remain ‘at the fingertips’ of automated tools that may be the next to come looking for this information, while mining the Web.

Using the nanopublication workflows and templates available at BDJ, biodiversity researchers can share assertions, such as:

So far, the available biodiversity nanopublication templates cover a range of associations, including those between taxa and individual organisms, as well as between those and their environments and nucleotide sequences. 

Nanopublication template customised for biodiversity research publications available from Nanodash.

As a result, those easy-to-digest ‘pixels of knowledge’ can capture and disseminate information about single observations, as well as higher taxonomic ranks. 

The novel domain-specific publication format was launched as part of the collaboration between Knowledge Pixels – an innovative startup tech company aiming to revolutionise scientific publishing and knowledge sharing and the open-access scholarly publisher Pensoft.

… so, what exactly is a nanopublication?

General structure of a nanopublication:

“the smallest unit of publishable information”,

as explained on nanopub.net.

Basically, a nanopublication – unlike a research article – is a tiny snippet of a precise and structured scientific finding (e.g. medication X treats disease Y), which exists as a reusable and cite-able pieces of a growing knowledge graph stored on a decentralised server network in a format that it is readable for humans, but also “understandable” and actionable for computers and their algorithms.

These semantic statements expressed in community-agreed terms, openly available through links to controlled vocabularies, ontologies and standards, are not only freely accessible to everyone in both human-readable and machine-actionable formats, but also easy-to-digest for computer algorithms and AI-powered assistants.

In short, nanopublications allow us to browse and aggregate such findings as part of a complex scientific knowledge graph. Therefore, nanopublications bring us one step closer to the next revolution in scientific publishing, which started with the emergence and increasing adoption of knowledge graphs. 

“As pioneers in the semantic open access scientific publishing field for over a decade now, we at Pensoft are deeply engaged with making research work actually available at anyone’s fingertips. What once started as breaking down paywalls to research articles and adding the right hyperlinks in the right places, is time to be built upon,”

said Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO at Pensoft, which had published the very first semantically enhanced research article in the biodiversity domain back in 2010 in the ZooKeys journal.

Why are nanopublications necessary?

By letting computer algorithms access published research findings in a structured format, nanopublications allow for the knowledge snippets that they are intended to communicate to be fully understandable and actionable. With nanopublications, each of those fragments of scientific information is interconnected and traceable back to its author(s) and scientific evidence. 

A nanopublication is a tiny snippet of a precise and structured scientific finding (e.g. medication X treats disease Y), which exists within a growing knowledge graph stored on a decentralised server network in a format that it is readable for humans, but also “understandable” and actionable for computers and their algorithms. Illustration by Knowledge Pixels. 

By building on shared knowledge representation models, these data become Interoperable (as in the I in FAIR), so that they can be delivered to the right user, at the right time, in the right place , ready to be reused (as per the R in FAIR) in new contexts. 

Another issue nanopublications are designed to address is research scrutiny. Today, scientific publications are produced at an unprecedented rate that is unlikely to cease in the years to come, as scholarship embraces the dissemination of early research outputs, including preprints, accepted manuscripts and non-conventional papers.

A network of interlinked nanopublications could also provide a valuable forum for scientists to test, compare, complement and build on each other’s results and approaches to a common scientific problem, while retaining the record of their cooperation each step along the way. 

*** 

We encourage you to try the nanopublications workflow yourself when submitting your next biodiversity paper to Biodiversity Data Journal. 

Community feedback on this pilot project and suggestions for additional biodiversity-related nanopublication templates are very welcome!

This Nanopublications for biodiversity workflow was created with a partial support of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 BiCIKL project under grant agreement No 101007492 and in collaboration with Knowledge Pixels AG.The tool uses data and API services of ChecklistBank, Catalogue of Life, GBIF, GenBank/ENA, BOLD, Darwin Core, Environmental Ontology (ENVO), Relation Ontology (RO), NOMEN, ZooBank, Index Fungorum, MycoBank, IPNI, TreatmentBank, and other resources. 

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On the journal website: https://bdj.pensoft.net/, you can find more about the unique features and workflows provided by the Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ), including innovative research paper formats (e.g. Data Paper, OMICS Data Paper, Software Description, R Package, Species Conservation Profiles, Alien Species Profile), expert-provided data audit for each data paper submission, automated data export and more.

Don’t forget to also sign up for the BDJ newsletter via the Email alert form on the journal’s homepage and follow it on Twitter and Facebook.

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How it works: Nanopublications linked to articles in RIO Journal

Earlier this year, Knowledge Pixels and Pensoft presented several routes for readers and researchers to contribute to research outputs – either produced by themselves or by others – through nanopublications generated through and visualised in Pensoft’s cross-disciplinary Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal, which uses the same nanopublication workflows.

Interoperable biodiversity data extracted from literature through open-ended queries

OpenBiodiv is a biodiversity database containing knowledge extracted from scientific literature, built as an Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System. 

The OpenBiodiv contribution to BiCIKL

Apart from coordinating the Horizon 2020-funded project BiCIKL, scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft has been the engine behind what is likely to be the first production-stage semantic system to run on top of a reasonably-sized biodiversity knowledge graph.

OpenBiodiv is a biodiversity database containing knowledge extracted from scientific literature, built as an Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System. 

As of February 2023, OpenBiodiv contains 36,308 processed articles; 69,596 taxon treatments; 1,131 institutions; 460,475 taxon names; 87,876 sequences; 247,023 bibliographic references; 341,594 author names; and 2,770,357 article sections and subsections.

In fact, OpenBiodiv is a whole ecosystem comprising tools and services that enable biodiversity data to be extracted from the text of biodiversity articles published in data-minable XML format, as in the journals published by Pensoft (e.g. ZooKeys, PhytoKeys, MycoKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal), and other taxonomic treatments – available from Plazi and Plazi’s specialised extraction workflow – into Linked Open Data.

“I believe that OpenBiodiv is a good real-life example of how the outputs and efforts of a research project may and should outlive the duration of the project itself. Something that is – of course – central to our mission at BiCIKL.”

explains Prof Lyubomir Penev, BiCIKL’s Project Coordinator and founder and CEO of Pensoft.

“The basics of what was to become the OpenBiodiv database began to come together back in 2015 within the EU-funded BIG4 PhD project of Victor Senderov, later succeeded by another PhD project by Mariya Dimitrova within IGNITE. It was during those two projects that the backend Ontology-O, the first versions of RDF converters and the basic website functionalities were created,”

he adds.

At the time OpenBiodiv became one of the nine research infrastructures within BiCIKL tasked with the provision of virtual access to open FAIR data, tools and services, it had already evolved into a RDF-based biodiversity knowledge graph, equipped with a fully automated extraction and indexing workflow and user apps.

Currently, Pensoft is working at full speed on new user apps in OpenBiodiv, as the team is continuously bringing into play invaluable feedback and recommendation from end-users and partners at BiCIKL. 

As a result, OpenBiodiv is already capable of answering open-ended queries based on the available data. To do this, OpenBiodiv discovers ‘hidden’ links between data classes, i.e. taxon names, taxon treatments, specimens, sequences, persons/authors and collections/institutions. 

Thus, the system generates new knowledge about taxa, scientific articles and their subsections, the examined materials and their metadata, localities and sequences, amongst others. Additionally, it is able to return information with a relevant visual representation about any one or a combination of those major data classes within a certain scope and semantic context.

Users can explore the database by either typing in any term (even if misspelt!) in the search engine available from the OpenBiodiv homepage; or integrating an Application Programming Interface (API); as well as by using SPARQL queries.

On the OpenBiodiv website, there is also a list of predefined SPARQL queries, which is continuously being expanded.

Sample of predefined SPARQL queries at OpenBiodiv.

“OpenBiodiv is an ambitious project of ours, and it’s surely one close to Pensoft’s heart, given our decades-long dedication to biodiversity science and knowledge sharing. Our previous fruitful partnerships with Plazi, BIG4 and IGNITE, as well as the current exciting and inspirational network of BiCIKL are wonderful examples of how far we can go with the right collaborators,”

concludes Prof Lyubomir Penev.

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Follow BiCIKL on Twitter and Facebook. Join the conversation on Twitter at #BiCIKL_H2020.

You can also follow Pensoft on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin and use #OpenBiodiv on Twitter.

Pensoft among the first 27 publishers to share prices & services via the Journal Comparison Service by Plan S

All journals published by Pensoft – each using the publisher’s self-developed ARPHA Platform – provide extensive and transparent information about their costs and services in line with the Plan S principles.

In support of transparency and openness in scholarly publishing and academia, the scientific publisher and technology provider Pensoft joined the Journal Comparison Service (JCS) initiative by cOAlition S, an alliance of national funders and charitable bodies working to increase the volume of free-to-read research. 

As a result, all journals published by Pensoft – each using the publisher’s self-developed ARPHA Platform – provide extensive and transparent information about their costs and services in line with the Plan S principles.

The JCS was launched to aid libraries and library consortia – the ones negotiating and participating in Open Access agreements with publishers – by providing them with everything they need to know in order to determine whether the prices charged by a certain journal are fair and corresponding to the quality of the service. 

According to cOAlition S, an increasing number of libraries and library consortia from Europe, Africa, North America, and Australia have registered with the JCS over the past year since the launch of the portal in September 2021.

While access to the JCS is only open to librarians, individual researchers may also make use of the data provided by the participating publishers and their journals. 

This is possible through an integration with the Journal Checker Tool, where researchers can simply enter the name of the journal of interest, their funder and affiliation (if applicable) to check whether the scholarly outlet complies with the Open Access policy of the author’s funder. A full list of all academic titles that provide data to the JCS is also publicly available. By being on the list means a journal and its publisher do not only support cOAlition S, but they also demonstrate that they stand for openness and transparency in scholarly publishing.

“We are delighted that Pensoft, along with a number of other publishers, have shared their price and service data through the Journal Comparison Service. Not only are such publishers demonstrating their commitment to open business models and cultures but are also helping to build understanding and trust within the research community.”

said Robert Kiley, Head of Strategy at cOAlition S. 

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About cOAlition S:

On 4 September 2018, a group of national research funding organisations, with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC), announced the launch of cOAlition S, an initiative to make full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality. It is built around Plan S, which consists of one target and 10 principles. Read more on the cOAlition S website.

About Plan S:

Plan S is an initiative for Open Access publishing that was launched in September 2018. The plan is supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations. Plan S requires that, from 2021, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms. Read more on the cOAlition S website.