Pensoft is among the first signatories dedicated to fully leveraging biodiversity knowledge from research publications within an open science framework by 2035
Some of the world’s leading institutions, experts and scientific infrastructures relating to biodiversity information are uniting around a new 10-year roadmap to ‘liberate’ data presently trapped in research publications.
The initiative aims to enable the creation of a ‘Libroscope’ – a mechanism for unlocking and linking data from scientific literature to support understanding of biodiversity, as the microscope and telescope previously revolutionized science. The plan largely builds on existing technology and workflows, and does not rely on construction of a new technical infrastructure.
The proposals result from a symposium involving 51 experts from 10 countries held in August 2024 at the 7th-century monastery at Disentis in the Swiss Alps, supported financially by the Arcadia Fund. The symposium was a 10-year follow-up to the 2014 meeting at Meise Botanic Garden in Belgium, which led to the Bouchout Declaration on open biodiversity knowledge management. The Disentis meeting evaluated progress since then, and identified priorities for the decade ahead.
Group photo from the Disentis meeting (Switzerland, August 2024).
While acknowledging major advances in the sharing and use of open biodiversity data, the participants noted that accessing data within research publications is often very cumbersome, with databases disconnected from each other and from the source literature. Liberating and linking data from such publications – estimated to encompass more than 500 million total pages – would represent a compelling mission for the next decade.
A roadmap for staged action over the next decade was agreed by the symposium participants, with the following vision: “By 2035, the power of biodiversity knowledge from research publications will be fully leveraged within an open science framework, including unencumbered data discovery, access, and re-use across scientific disciplines and policy applications.”
The ‘Disentis Roadmap’, further developed following the symposium, and now released publicly, has already been signed by 26 institutions and a further 46 individual experts on five continents – among them major natural history collections such as Meise Botanic Garden, Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin, the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; infrastructures such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), Catalogue of Life, LifeWatch ERIC and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB); journal publishers such as Pensoft Publishers and the European Journal of Taxonomy; research institutions such as Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Senckenberg Society for Nature Research; and networks such as TDWG Biodiversity Information Standards and Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF). See the full list of signatories here.
The roadmap remains open for further signatures, ahead of the launch of an action plan at the Living Data conference in Bogotá, Colombia in October 2025. The original signatories hope that a much broader group of institutions and individuals, across global regions and disciplines, will join the initiative and help to shape implementation of its vision. Engagement of funders will also be critical to realize its objectives.
The specific goals of the roadmap are that by 2035:
All major public biodiversity research funders and academic publishers will encourage and enable publication of data adhering to the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable);
Biodiversity-focussed publications will be accessible in machine-actionable formats, with all non-copyrightable parts of articles flowing into public data repositories;
Published research on biodiversity will be ‘fully AI-ready’, that is openly available for AI training and properly labelled for ingestion by machine-learning modelled, within appropriate ethical and legal frameworks;
Dedicated funding from research and infrastructure grants will be reserved for ensuring access to biodiversity data and knowledge.
“We finally have a chance to make a quantum leap in understanding and monitoring biodiversity, by leveraging the power of digital technologies, and combining modern genomic methods with the vast amount of research data published daily and currently stuck in the publication prison. The ‘Libroscope’ will help to explore the universe of existing knowledge, accumulated over hundreds of years, and bring it to the forefront of developments in the digital age, helping nature and people across the globe.”
commented Donat Agosti of the Swiss organization Plazi, who convened the Disentis symposium.
A recent demonstration of the principles of the ‘Libroscope’ was the launch of data portals for the European Journal of Taxonomy (EJT) and the Biodiversity Data Journal, as part of the GBIF hosted portal programme. The new portals showcase the data contained within taxonomic literature published by the journals, making use of the workflow originally developed by Plazi and partners to extract re-usable data from articles traditionally locked in static PDF files. Once created, these data objects then flow into platforms such as GBIF, Catalogue of Life, ChecklistBank and the BiodiversityPMC, and are stored in the Biodiversity Literature Repository at Zenodo hosted by CERN. This process enables data on new species and the location of related specimens cited in the literature to be openly accessible in near-real time, and available for long-term access.
The newly launched Biodiversity Data Journal data portal is part of the GBIF-hosted portal programme. It showcase the data contained within taxonomic literature published by the journal.
“As a publisher of dozens of renowned academic journals in the field of biodiversity and systematics with experience in technology development, at Pensoft, we have always recognised the key role of academic publishers in scholarly communication. It’s not only about publishing the latest research. Above all, it’s about putting scientific work in the hands of those who need it: be it future researchers, policy-makers or their AI-powered assistants. Now that the Disentis roadmap is already a fact, we hope that many others will also join us on this ambitious journey to open up the knowledge we have today for those who will need it tomorrow.”
said Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO at Pensoft, who attended the Disentis symposium.
“By repositioning scientific publications as an essential part of the research cycle, the Disentis Roadmap encourages publishers and the scientific community to move beyond open access towards FAIR access. Proactively ensuring data quality and dissemination is the core mission of the European Journal of Taxonomy. In this way, EJT enhances the immediate discoverability and usability of the taxonomic information it publishes, making it more valuable to the scientific community as a whole. Adherence to the Disentis vision marks a crucial step in the liberation and enrichment of knowledge about biodiversity.”
said Laurence Bénichou, founder and liaison officer of the European Journal of Taxonomy.
The Chief Executive Officer of Meise Botanic Garden, Steven Dessein, who attended the Disentis Symposium, commented:
“Meise Botanic Garden fully supports the Disentis Roadmap, which builds on the foundation laid by the Bouchout Declaration. Open biodiversity data is essential to tackling today’s pressing environmental challenges, from biodiversity loss to climate change. By ensuring research publications become more accessible and interconnected, this roadmap represents a critical step toward harnessing biodiversity knowledge for science, policy, and conservation.”
Christophe Déssimoz, Executive Director of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, another signatory of the Disentis Roadmap, added:
“We have long championed the principles of open, structured, and interoperable data to advance life sciences. The Disentis Roadmap applies these same principles to biodiversity knowledge, ensuring that critical data is not just available, but truly actionable for research, policy, and conservation.”
The director of the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum of Berlin, Thomas Borsch, noted that more than any other branch of science, taxonomic research depended on the machine-actionable availability of biodiversity data from the literature:
“The ‘Libroscope’ postulated in the Disentis Roadmap will enable a new generation of research workflows through its interoperable approach,” said Professor Borsch. “This will be very helpful to address pressing issues in biodiversity research and in particular to improve the use of quality information on organisms in national and global assessments.”
The chief scientist of the national museum of natural history in Paris (MNHN) said:
“We, like all similar museums and taxonomic institutions, are focussed on linking taxonomic and collection data with digital reproductions and molecular information to create the ‘extended digital specimen.’ However, the potential of taxonomic publications and text mining should not be underestimated either. On the contrary, it is a smart and accessible way to dig into scientific publications so as to retrieve, link and consolidate, research data of great relevance to many disciplines. This is why our institution fully supports the Disentis initiative.”
Christos Arvanitidis, CEO of the Biodiversity and Ecosystem e-Science Infrastructure LifeWatch ERIC, commented:
“LifeWatch ERIC is proud to be part of this initiative, as providing access and support to biodiversity and ecosystem data is fully aligned with our mission. The Disentis Roadmap opens up new opportunities for our research infrastructure to help make what science has provided us accessible and usable, and to improve the FAIRness of data for research and science-based policy.”
Tim Robertson, deputy director and head of informatics at the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), who also attended the Disentis meeting added:
“We’re excited to see the results from Disentis partners like Plazi, BHL, Pensoft and the European Journal of Taxonomy who are focussed on liberating data connected with scientific publications,” said . “GBIF will continue to do our part to improve the standards, tools and services that help expand both the benefits and the impact of FAIR and open data on biodiversity science and policy.”
Olaf Bánki, Executive Director of the Catalogue of Life, commented:
“We call out to the scientific community, especially the younger generation, to join our effort in unlocking biodiversity data from literature. Actionable biodiversity and taxonomic data from digitized literature contributes to creating an index of all described organisms of all life on earth. We need such data to tackle and understand the current biodiversity crisis.”
On this occasion full of sweet memories, we are also inviting you to complete this 3-minute survey. We would deeply appreciate your invaluable feedback!
It was in late 1992 when biologist and ecologist Prof Dr Lyubomir Penev in a collaboration with his friend Prof. Sergei Golovatch established Pensoft: a scholarly publisher with the ambition to contribute to novel and even revolutionary methods in academic publishing by applying its own approach to how science is published, shared and used. Inspired by the world’s best practices in the field, Pensoft would never cease to view the issues and gaps in scholarly publishing in line with its slogan: “by scientists, for scientists”.
As we celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pensoft, we are asking ourselves: What’s a tree without its roots?
That’s why we’ve put up an attractive timeline of Pensoft’s milestones on our website, and complemented it with some key figures, in an attempt to translate those years into numbers. Yet, one can say only that much in figures. Below, we’ll give a bit more context and background about Pensoft’s key milestones.
1994: Pensoft publishes its first book & book series
In time for New Year’s Day in 1994, we published the first book bearing the name of Pensoft. The catalogue of the sheet weaver spiders (Lyniphiidae) of Northern Asia did not only set the beginning of the publishing activities of Pensoft, but also started the extensive Pensoft Series Faunistica, which continues to this day, and currently counts over 120 titles.
2003: Pensoft joins its first EU-funded research project
By 2003, we were well-decided to expand our activities toward participation in collaborative, multinational projects, thereby building on our mission to shed light and communicate the latest scientific work done.
By participating in the FP6-funded project ALARM (abbreviation for Assessing LArge-scale environmental Risks with tested Methods), coordinated by Dr. Joseph Settele from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (Germany), we would start contributing to the making of science itself in close collaboration with another 67 institutions from across Europe. Our role at ALARM during the five years of the duration of the project was to disseminate and communicate the project outcome. At the end of the project, we also produced the highly appreciated within the community Atlas of Biodiversity Risk.
As for today, 19 years later, Pensoft has taken part in 40 research projects as a provider of various services ranging from data & knowledge management and next-generation open access publishing; to communication, dissemination and (web)design; to stakeholder engagement; consultations; and event and project management.
Our project activities culminated last year, when we became the coordinator of a large and exciting BiCIKL project, dedicated to access to and linking of biodiversity data along the entire data and research life cycle.
2008: Pensoft launches its first scholarly journal to revolutionise & accelerate biodiversity research
Openly accessible and digital-first since the very start, the ZooKeys journal was born on a sunny morning in California during the Entomological Society of America meeting in 2007, when Prof Lyubomir Penev and his renowned colleague Dr Terry Erwin from the Smithsonian Institution agreed over breakfast that zoologists from around the world could indeed use a new-age taxonomic journal. What the community at the time was missing was a scholarly outlet that would not only present a smooth fast track for their research papers, while abiding by the highest and most novel standards in the field, but do so freely and openly to any reader at any time and in any place. Fast forward to 2021, ZooKeys remains the most prolific open-access journal in zoology.
With over 1,100 volumes published to date, ZooKeys is one of our most renowned journals with its own curious and intriguing history. You can find more about it in the celebratory blog post we published on the occasion of the journal’s 1,000th volume in late 2020.
At the time of writing, Pensoft has 21 journals under its own belt, co-publishes another 16, and provides its self-developed journal management platform ARPHA to another 35 scholarly outlets.
2010a: Pensoft launches its first journal publishing platform
By 2010, we realised that the main hurdle holding our progress as a next-age publisher of scientific knowledge was posed by the technology – or lack thereof – underlying the publishing process. We figured that – in our position of users – we were best equipped to figure what exactly this backbone structure should be made of.
This is when we released the publishing platform TRIADA, which was able to support both the editorial and the publication processes at our journals. This was also the point in time when we added “technology provider” to the Pensoft’s byline. Surely, we had so many ideas in our mind and TRIADA was only the beginning!
2010b: In the 50th issue of ZooKeys, Pensoft publishes the first semantically enhanced biodiversity research papers
Later the same year, TRIADA let us write some history. The 50th volume of ZooKeys wasn’t only special because of its number. It contained the first scholarly papers in the study of biodiversity featuring semantic enrichments.
The novelty that keeps a taxon only a click away from a list of related data, including its occurrences, genomics data, treatments, literature etc. is a feature that remains a favourite to our journals’ users to this very day. Unique to date, this workflow is one of the many outcomes of our fantastic long-time collaboration and friendship with Plazi.
2011: Journal of Hymenoptera Research becomes the first society journal to move to Pensoft
Three years after the launch of the very first Pensoft journal, we received a request from the International Society of Hymenopterists who wanted for their own journal: the Journal of Hymenoptera Research to follow the example of ZooKeys and provide to their authors, editors and readers a similar set of services and features designed to streamline biodiversity knowledge in a modern, user-friendly and highly efficient manner.
Ever since, the journal has been co-published by the Society and Pensoft, and enjoyed growing popularity and appeal amongst hymenopterists from around the world.
Impact Factor and CiteScore trend for Journal of Hymenoptera Research since 2015.
2013: Pensoft replaces TRIADA with its own in-house built innovative ARPHA Platform
As we said, TRIADA was merely the crude foundation of what was to become the ARPHA publishing platform: a publishing solution providing a lot more than an end-to-end entirely online environment to support the whole publishing process on both journal and article level.
On top of that, ARPHA’s publishing package includes a variety of automated and manually provided services, web service integrations and highly customisable features. With all of those, we aimed at one thing only: create a comprehensive scholarly publishing solution to our own dearest journals and all their users.
Having just unveiled ARPHA Platform, we were quite confident that we have developed a pretty all-in publishing solution. Our journals would be launched, set up, hosted and upgraded safely under our watchful eye, while authors, editors and reviewers would need to send not a single email or a file outside of our collaborative environment from the moment they submit a manuscript to the moment they see it published, indexed and archived at all relevant databases.
Yet, we could still spot a gap left to bridge. The Pensoft Writing Tool (or what is now known as the ARPHA Writing Tool or AWT) provides a space where researchers can do the authoring itself prior to submitting a manuscript straight to the journal. It all happens within the tool, with co-authors, external collaborators, reviewers and editors all able to contribute to the same manuscript file. Due to the XML technology underlying AWT, various data(sets) and references can be easily imported in a few clicks, while a list of templates and content management features lets researchers spend their time and efforts on their scientific work rather than format requirements.
2015: Pensoft launches the open-science RIO Journal
Six years ago, amid heated discussions over the pros and cons of releasing scientific knowledge freely to all, we felt it’s time to push the boundaries even further.
No wonder that, at the time, a scholarly journal with the aim to bring to light ‘alternative’ research outputs from along the whole research process, such as grant proposals, project and workshop reports, data management plans and research ideas amongst many others, was seen as quite brave and revolutionary. Long story short, a year after its launch, RIO earned the honorary recognition from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) to be named an Open Science Innovator.
Learn about the key milestones and achievements at RIO Journal to date – in addition to its future goals – in the special blog post and the editorial published on the occasion of the journal’s fifth anniversary.
2016: Pensoft provides ARPHA Platform as a white-label journal publishing solution for the first time
Led by our intrinsic understanding for scholars and smaller publishers, we saw the need of many journals and their owners to simultaneously secure a user-friendly and sustainable publishing solution for their scientific outlets. This is why we decided to also offer our ARPHA Platform as a standalone package of technology, services and features, dissociated with Pensoft as a publisher. This option is particularly useful for university presses, learned societies and institutions who would rather stick to exclusivity when it comes to their journal’s branding and imprint.
Another step forward to encompassing the whole spectrum of research outputs was to take care after conference materials: proceedings and abstracts. Once again, our thinking was that all scientific work and efforts need to be made openly available, accessible, reusable and creditable.
Both ARPHA Conference Abstracts and ARPHA Proceedings allow for organisers to conveniently bring the publications together in a conference-branded collection, thereby providing a one-stop permanent access point to all content submitted and presented at a particular event, alongside associated data, images, videos and multimedia, video recordings of conference talks or graphic files of poster presentations.
Publications at both platforms benefit from all key advantages available to conventional research papers at a Pensoft journal, such as registration at Crossref and individual DOI; publication in PDF, semantically enhanced HTML and data-minable XML formats; indexing and archiving at multiple major databases; science communications services.
2019: Pensoft develops the OpenBiodiv Knowledge Graph
As firm believers in the power and future of linked and FAIR data, at Pensoft we realise there is still a great gap in the way biodiversity data is collated, stored, accessed and made available to researchers and key stakeholders for further reuse.
In fact, this is an area within biodiversity research that is in dire need of a revolutionary mechanism to provide a readily available and convenient hub that allows a researcher to access all related data via multi-directional links interconnecting various and standardised databases, in accordance with the Web 2.0 principles.
As the first step in that direction, in 2019, we launched the OpenBiodiv Knowledge Graph, which began to collate various types of biodiversity data as extracted from semantically enhanced articles published by Pensoft and taxonomic treatments harvested by Plazi.
Since then, the OpenBiodiv Knowledge Graph has evolved into the Open Biodiversity Knowledgement Management System (OBKMS), which also comprises a Linked Open Dataset, an ontology and а website. Our work on the OBKMS continues to this day, fueled by just as much enthusiasm as in those early days in 2019.
By 2020, a number of factors and issues that had long persisted within scholarly publishing and academia had already triggered the emergence of multiple preprint servers. Yet, the onset of the unprecedented for our age COVID-19 pandemic, seemed like the final straw that made everyone realise we needed to start uncovering early scientific work, and we needed to do that fast.
At the time, we had already been considering applying the Pensoft approach to preprints. So, we came up with a solution that could seamlessly blend into our existing infrastructure.
Offered as an opt-in service to journals published on the ARPHA Platform, ARPHA Preprints allows for authors to check a box and post their manuscripts as a preprint as they are filling in the submission form at a participating journal.
Learn more about ARPHA Preprints on the ARPHA blog.
2021a: RIO Journal expands into a project-driven knowledge hub
Ever since its launch, RIO had been devised as the ultimate scholarly venue to share the early, intermediate and final results of a research project. While collections at the journal had already been put in good use, we still had what to add, so that we could provide a one-stop place for consortia to permanently store their outputs and make them easily discoverable and accessible long after their project had concluded.
With the upgraded collections, their owners received the oppotunity to also add various research publications – including scholarly articles published elsewhere, author-formatted documents and preprints. In the former case, the article is visualised within the collection at RIO via a link to its original source, while in the latter, it is submitted and published via ARPHA Preprints.
Over the years, we have been partnering with many like-minded innovators and their institutions from across the natural science community. Surely, we hadn’t successfully developed all those technologies and workflows without their invaluable feedback and collaborations.
In 2021, our shared passion and vision about the future of research data availability and usage culminated in the project BiCIKL (abbreviation for Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library), which was granted funding by the European Commission and will run until April 2024.
Within BiCIKL, our team of 14 European institutions are deploying and improving our own and partnering infrastructures to bridge gaps between each other’s biodiversity data types and classes with the ultimate goal to provide flawless access to data across all stages of the research cycle. By the end of the project, together we will have created the first-of-its-kind Biodiversity Knowledge Hub, where a researcher will be able to retrieve a full set of linked and open biodiversity data.
Naturally, being a coordinator of such a huge endeavour towards revolutionising biodiversity science is a great honour by itself.
For us, though, this project has a special place in our hearts, as it perfectly resonates with the very reason why we are here: publishing and sharing science in the most efficient and user-friendly manner.
Having been publishing its historically renowned Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift and Zoosystematics and Evolution in partnership with Pensoft since 2014, the Museum extends the collaboration by moving a third signature journal
Launched in 1998 under the name Mitteilungen aus dem Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Geowissenschaftliche Reihe, Fossil Record is the Natural History Museum of Berlin’s palaeontological journal. Published in two issues a year, the open-access scientific outlet covers research from all areas of palaeontology, including the taxonomy and systematics of fossil organisms, biostratigraphy, palaeoecology, and evolution. It deals with all taxonomic groups, including invertebrates, microfossils, plants, and vertebrates.
Following its move to ARPHA, Fossil Record is to utilise the whole package of ARPHA Platform’s services, including its fast-track, end-to-end publishing module, designed to appeal to readers, authors, reviewers and editors alike.
With ARPHA, each submitted manuscript is carried through the review, editing, publication, dissemination and archiving stages without leaving the platform’s collaboration-centred online environment. The articles are made available in PDF and machine-readable JATS XML formats, as well as semantically enriched HTML for better and mobile-friendly reader experience.
As a result, the journal’s articles are as easy to discover, access, reuse and cite as possible. Once published, the content is indexed and archived instantaneously and its underlying data exported to relevant specialised databases. Simultaneously, a suite of various metrics is enabled to facilitate tracking the usage of articles and sub-article elements, such as figures and tables.
“We have deeply enjoyed our collaboration with the Natural History Museum of Berlin for the past seven years that started with two great journals moving to our scholarly portfolio and advanced open access. Now, I am delighted to strengthen this wonderful partnership by welcoming Fossil Record and its fantastic editorial team to the families of ARPHA and Pensoft. I am certain that together we will not only repeat the success we had with DEZ and ZSE, but will actually build on it,”
says Prof. Dr Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO at ARPHA and Pensoft.
About the Natural History Museum of Berlin:
The “Museum für Naturkunde – Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science” is an integrated research museum within the Leibniz Association. It is one of the most important research institutions worldwide in the areas of biological and geological evolution and biodiversity.
The Museum’s mission is to discover and describe life and earth – with people, through dialogue. As an excellent research museum and innovative communication platform, it wants to engage with and influence the scientific and societal discourse about the future of our planet, worldwide. Its vision, strategy and structure make the museum an excellent research museum. The Natural History Museum of Berlin has research partners in Berlin, Germany and approximately 60 other countries. Over 700,000 visitors per year as well as steadily increasing participation in educational and other events show that the Museum has become an innovative communication centre that helps shape the scientific and social dialogue about the future of our earth.
In a world first, the Natural History Museum, London, has collaborated with economic consultants, Frontier Economics Ltd, to explore the economic and societal value of digitising natural history collections and concluded that digitisation has the potential to see a seven to tenfold return on investment. Whilst significant progress is already being made at the Museum, additional investment is needed in order to unlock the full potential of the Museum’s vast collections – more than 80 million objects. The project’s report is published in the open science scientific journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO Journal).
The societal benefits of digitising natural history collections extends to global advancements in food security, biodiversity conservation, medicine discovery, minerals exploration, and beyond. Brand new, rigorous economic report predicts investing in digitising natural history museum collections could also result in a tenfold return. The Natural History Museum, London, has so far made over 4.9 million digitised specimens available freely online – over 28 billion records have been downloaded over 429,000 download events over the past six years.
Digitisation at the Natural History Museum, London
Digitisation is the process of creating and sharing the data associated with Museum specimens. To digitise a specimen, all its related information is added to an online database. This typically includes where and when it was collected and who found it, and can include photographs, scans and other molecular data if available. Natural history collections are a unique record of biodiversity dating back hundreds of years, and geodiversity dating back millennia. Creating and sharing data this way enables science that would have otherwise been impossible, and we accelerate the rate at which important discoveries are made from our collections.
The Natural History Museum’s collection of 80 million items is one of the largest and most historically and geographically diverse in the world. By unlocking the collection online, the Museum provides free and open access for global researchers, scientists, artists and more. Since 2015, the Museum has made 4.9 million specimens available on the Museum’s Data Portal, which have seen more than 28 billion downloads over 427,000 download events.
This means the Museum has digitised about 6% of its collections to date. Because digitisation is expensive, costing tens of millions of pounds, it is difficult to make a case for further investment without better understanding the value of this digitisation and its benefits.
In 2021, the Museum decided to explore the economic impacts of collections data in more depth, and commissioned Frontier Economics to undertake modelling, resulting in this project report, now made publicly available in the open-science journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO Journal), and confirming benefits in excess of £2 billion over 30 years. While the methods in this report are relevant to collections globally, this modelling focuses on benefits to the UK, and is intended to support the Museum’s own digitisation work, as well as a current scoping study funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council about the case for digitising all UK natural science collections as a research infrastructure.
“Sharing data from our collections can transform scientific research and help find solutions for nature and from nature. Our digitised collections have helped establish the baseline plant biodiversity in the Amazon, find wheat crops that are more resilient to climate change and support research into potential zoonotic origins of Covid-19. The research that comes from sharing our specimens has immense potential to transform our world and help both people and the planet thrive,“
says Helen Hardy, Science Digital Programme Manager at the Natural History Museum.
How digitisation impacts scientific research?
The data from museum collections accelerates scientific research, which in turn creates benefits for society and the economy across a wide range of sectors. Frontier Economics Ltd have looked at the impact of collections data in five of these sectors: biodiversity conservation, invasive species, medicines discovery, agricultural research and development and mineral exploration.
“The Natural History Museum’s collection is a real treasure trove which, if made easily accessible to scientists all over the world through digitisation, has the potential to unlock ground-breaking research in any number of areas. Predicting exactly how the data will be used in future is clearly very uncertain. We have looked at the potential value that new research could create in just five areas focussing on a relatively narrow set of outcomes. We find that the value at stake is extremely large, running into billions,”
says Dan Popov, Economist at Frontier Economics Ltd.
The new analyses attempt to estimate the economic value of these benefits using a range of approaches, with the results in broad agreement that the benefits of digitisation are at least ten times greater than the costs. This represents a compelling case for investment in museum digital infrastructure without which the many benefits will not be realised.
“This new analysis shows that the data locked up in our collections has significant societal and economic value, but we need investment to help us release it,“
Other benefits could include improvements to the resilience of agricultural crops by better understanding their wild relatives, research into invasive species which can cause significant damage to ecosystems and crops, and improving the accuracy of mining.
Finally, there are other impacts that such work could have on how science is conducted itself. The very act of digitising specimens means that researchers anywhere on the planet can access these collections, saving time and money that may have been spent as scientists travelled to see specific objects.
Popov D, Roychoudhury P, Hardy H, Livermore L, Norris K (2021) The Value of Digitising Natural History Collections. Research Ideas and Outcomes 7: e78844. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.7.e78844
With both Pensoft and Publons aiming to facilitate scientific research and its introduction to the wide world, it only makes sense for the two to join efforts in a campaign to speed up publications, while giving the rightful credit to reviewers. From now on, anyone who makes this contribution to any of the 15 Pensoft journals will be able to opt-in to get credit for their peer reviews on Publons.
As for the moment, there are already 32 Pensoft reviewers who have added a total of 58 reviews to their Publons personal accounts and already started to receive recognition for their peer input – a kind of contribution that traditionally tends to be largely overlooked in academia. However, you can get a head start by signing-up to Publons and joining the 50,000 peer reviewers that are getting credit for their peer reviews.
The only exception to this rule is Pensoft’s next generation Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal, where the policy of ultimate transparency and openness requires all peer reviews and their authors to be made public. It is also the only Pensoft journal whose article titles will be available on a Publons profile by default. Another distinctive feature of RIO’s – an assigned DOI for each peer review, is also supported in Publons to ensure reviewers get the most out of their contribution.
“Pensoft has a strong history of innovation and we’re excited to be working together to reward the efforts of peer reviewers,” comments the new partnership Publons co-founder Andrew Preston. “It’s also great to see that many Pensoft editors are already Publons users.”
“Crediting reviewers’ voluntary contributions to the quality of scientific publications has always been a problem, especially with the current tremendous increase in the volume of published research outputs. We are happy that Publons has found such a solution and that we can credit our reviewers through recording their activity in an entirely automated way,” added founder and CEO of Pensoft Prof. Lyubomir Penev.
