The Disentis Roadmap

data flow
From publication prison to the re-use of the liberated data by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), exemplified by the European Journal of Taxonomy and the Biodiversity Data Journal. This pipeline includes over 160 different journals, and it results in over 1 million taxonomic treatments and 710,000 figures.

Today’s official launch of the Disentis Roadmap is another significant step toward providing access to the data imprisoned in scientific publications. The data are imprisoned in the sense that only a human can understand the content, and only if access to the publication is granted. A machine can’t ingest and use the data because of lack of access, standardization, or other hurdles. With a corpus of over 500 million printed pages, a daily flood of new publications, and increasingly more powerful artificial intelligence-based tools, machine access is crucial for research, biodiversity conservation and an informed society.

What is the Disentis Roadmap?

The Roadmap is a ten-year plan to liberate data from scientific publications and make biodiversity data an integral part of our daily knowledge. The initial signatories of the Roadmap include 22 organizations and individuals from around the globe that came together in August 2024 at the monastery of Disentis, Switzerland. Main support for the Roadmap has been provided by the Arcadia Fund, and supplemented by SIBiLS and Pensoft.

What is the Roadmap based on?

The Roadmap is based on the realization that we need to have full access to the scientific literature to write reports on the state of nature such as the IPBES reports, to expedite monitoring systems for biodiversity, understand nature in such basic terms as to provide a list of all the known species and access to all the knowledge about them.

The Roadmap is a follow-up to the Bouchout Declaration on Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management signed in 2014 by 94 institutions and 209 individuals, and the realization that publications need a special emphasis to live up to the promise of open access in genomic and specimen-based science.

What is the Libroscope?

The Libroscope is a planned tool to discover and liberate data in publications and make it available for reuse in a digital environment. A pilot is implemented in our existing workflow of publications from publishers via TreatmentBank and Biodiversity Literature Repository to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the Biodiversity PMC where the data is reused and made accessible for further research and exploration. The recently launched hosted portals for the European Journal of Taxonomy and the Biodiversity Data Journal demonstrate the possibilities of having access to the data within hours of the release of the publication.