Happy New Year 2018

2017 has been a productive year at Plazi.

  • 9,601 articles have been processed from 173 different journals resulting in 82,082 taxonomic treatments, 62,958 scientific figures uploaded to the Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR), including 314,881 bibliographic references of which 37,120 have a digital object identifier (DOI).
  • The 3,177 articles published in 2017 that we mined for data included one new family, 330 new genera and 5,145 new species, and a total of 30,091 taxonomic treatments.
  • The TreatmentBank now includes 216,868 taxonomic treatments from 26,727 articles; of the 850,781 bibliographic references 79,205 have DOI.
  • The Biodiversity Literature Repository now includes 167,681 open access figures and 12,586 open access publications.
  • Data is transferred on a daily base to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and to NCBI making Plazi one of the largest name providers to the taxonomic backbone.
  • Access to BLR has been greatly improved with the creation of standards-compliant and well-documented Zenodeo API, a nodejs (server-side JavaScript) API that queries the Zenodo API with more BLR-specific queries.
  • A new web application called Ocellus, now provides improved access to the image store in the BLR.

2018 promises to be an exciting year at Plazi.

  • On January 1, ICEDIG has started to build the infrastructure to digitize European Natural History collections as part of a larger initiative DiSSCo to provide access to this valuable content. Plazi is responsible for drafting the data sharing policy and collaborating with Zenodo/CERN to build a demo repository for the digitized products within ICEDIG.
  • On January 1, the collaboration with the European Journal of Taxonomy (EJT) has started to produce a semantically enhanced version of its articles based on a novel archival version a the Journal Archival Tag Suits Taxpub flavor. This will allow dissemination of EJT’s data more widely, for example, to GBIF, and will allow text and data mining, and visualization of the content more easily.
  • In 2018, Plazi will offer a service to convert legacy or traditionally published articles into semantically enhanced publications.
  • In 2018, together with GBIF, we hope to establish a workflow from publications to GBIF that provides immediate access to the names of new described species and the links to their data, such as treatment, tables, figures, and hopefully increasingly the cited material.
  • We aim at providing access to the taxonomic treatments and figures of over 8,500 of half of the new species described annually.
  • We wish that in 2018, the keepers of scientific collections start using citable, standardized, automatically discoverable identifiers for the digital copies of their specimens. We also hope that the publishers include those identifiers in their taxonomic works.
  • We hope to establish a workflow from data extracted within the Plazi workflow to Wikidata and Wikicite.