Don’t make me think: Biodiversity Data Publishing Made Easy
One of the major flaws of conventional publishing of biodiversity research is the generally low applicability and reuse of the published information and data. The continuing practice of publishing in non-machine-readable formats, such as paper and PDF, is one of the five reasons causing the “Publishing bottleneck”, a phenomenon comparable to the “taxonomic impediment” in biodiversity research. Further motivation for shifting the current model in scholarly publishing is the rapidly increasing amount of unpublished data due to the intensification of methods for scientific exploration, e.g. genome sequencing, large-scale inventories and accumulation of ecological data; low uptake and inconsistent policies for data publishing; pressure of funders and administrators to publish in “high-impact” journals; and increasing difficulties with peer-review, due to rising volume of publications and increasing time-pressure on reviewers.
Scratchpads (http://scratchpads.eu/), an open source virtual research environment, allow anyone to present biodiversity data online in their own website. They provide structured and standardised ways of recording descriptive data, specimen and observations, distribution data, biological images, phylogenies and more.
The new Scratchpads Publication Module allows researchers to formally submit data from their Scratchpad to as a paper via The Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ) (www.pensoft.net/journals/bdj) and associated Pensoft Writing Tool (PWT) (www.pwt.pensoft.net). These systems have been launched within the EU-funded project ViBRANT (www.vbrant.eu) to provide the first seamless e-infrastructure and work flow ever to complete the full publishing life cycle within a single, XML-based, online collaborative platform.
