Disentis Roadmap: A decadal roadmap for liberating global biodiversity knowledge from literature (introduction)

time: 11 am CET Presenter: Donat Agosti (Plazi), Laurence Bénichou (MNHN)

Published biodiversity research—ranging from species descriptions and traits to distributions, interactions, and drivers of change—remains largely locked in inaccessible literature and electronic resources. This constitutes a major barrier to scientific progress and evidence-based policy. Making biodiversity knowledge openly available through connected, curated, and digitally accessible knowledge bases is both a pressing challenge and a critical opportunity for the global research and policy communities.The Disentis Roadmap emerged from a symposium held in Disentis, Switzerland, in August 2024, which assessed the impact of the 2014 Bouchout Declaration on Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management and identified strategic priorities for the coming decade. As of May 25, 2025, the Roadmap has been signed by 97 individuals and institutions. Discussions were grounded in existing workflows for data liberation, involving a collaborative effort among key stakeholders: publishers (CETAF, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle Paris, Pensoft), Plazi, the Biodiversity Literature Repository at Zenodo, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), ChecklistBank, and the Biodiversity PubMedCentral hosted by the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics Library Services (SiBILS). These efforts include the automated conversion and reuse of 198 biodiversity journals, resulting in substantial outputs from 95,000 publications such as Open Findable, Accessible, Interactionable, and Reusable (FAIR) 760,000 taxonomic treatments, 630,000 figures, and 1,7 million material citations. Additional input has been the extensive digitization of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and a large number of individual scientists and research groups. Use cases have informed the process, including literature reuse for Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) reporting, mining of biotic interactions at Biodiversity PMC, the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment, and the expansion of ChecklistBank at GBIF.This presentation introduces the Disentis Roadmap and concludes with a blueprint outlining how its ambitious goals can be achieved through technical innovation and coordinated organizational action.

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