Title: ZooKeys facilitates discovery and access to ‘primary biodiversity data’ simultaneously with scholarly publication
ZooKeys became the first systematic open access journal to facilitate discovery and access to ‘primary biodiversity data’ simultaneously with scholarly publication using GBIF infrastructure. ZooKeys is a peer-reviewed, open-access, ‘rapid-publish’ journal launched to support the free exchange of ideas and information in systematic zoology. Papers are published ‘instantly’ online and in the traditional printed format, in full compliance with the current requirements of ICZN, the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature.
On June 1, 2009 ZooKeys (http://www.pensoftonline.net/zookeys/) achieved the significant milestone of becoming the first journal in systematic zoology implementing a unique combination of data publication and semantic enhancement within the mainstream process of journal publishing. The paper by Miller, Griswold and Yin (2009) (http://www.pensoftonline.net/zookeys), doi: 10.3897/zookeys.11.160 demonstrates how; (a) all primary biodiversity data underlying a taxonomic monograph can be published as a dataset under a separate Digital Object Identifier (DOI) within the paper; (b) the occurrence dataset can be made discoverable and accessible through the GBIF infrastructure (http://data.gbif.org/) simultaneously with scholarly publication; (c) the occurrence dataset can be published as a KML file under a distinct DOI to provide an interactive visualisation in Google Earth; (d) new taxa can be registered in ZooBank prior to publication; and (e) new taxa can be provided to the Encyclopedia of Life through XML markup on the day of scholarly publication.
According to Dr. Lyubomir Penev, Managing Editor of ZooKeys, “describing new species is not an easy task and behind this process there is a long time period of accumulation of knowledge, efforts and investments (funding). ZooKeys is convinced that each primary occurrence record collected on Earth has its own value and deserves to be properly registered, published, preserved and disseminated, and authors, data contributors and publishers should be properly credited for that. Thus, the role played by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) in promoting and facilitating discovery, and the publishing of ‘primary biodiversity data’ is not only laudable, but must be engaged into!”.
ZooKeys has employed GBIF’s recently launched Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) (http://ipt.gbif.org/) to facilitate discovery and mobilisation of primary biodiversity data associated with their publication process. This means that the primary biodiversity records upon which new taxa descriptions are based can become quickly accessible to all. “We believe that such an approach will motivate authors to publish their data and give them due recognition for that in the form of citations, future co-authorship, and career building. The time will come when data discovery and publishing initiatives like GBIF will automatically index such datasets and incorporate them along with the corresponding bibliographic metadata details”, states the forum paper (http://www.pensoftonline.net/zookeys) doi: 10.3897/zookeys.11.210) published on this occasion.