The European Journal of Taxonomy (EJT) — a leading electronic open-access journal for taxonomic research — has become the first scientific journal to launch a GBIF-hosted portal, paving the way for other academic publishers to participate in the programme. This marks a move to elevate the access, reuse and interoperability of material citations, traditionally confined within PDFs, that are now disseminated through published datasets.
Users can explore features such as data clustering which enables discovery of potentially related occurrences by identifying related type specimens and linkages between records from different sources. This feature in combination with powerful search tools and dashboard visualization extends the reach of occurrences in GBIF to taxonomic treatments and publications through the EJT portal.
“EJT has always aimed to be at the forefront of open-access taxonomic publishing. The new GBIF-hosted portal exemplifies this mission. By transforming our material citation records into dynamic, reusable data, we are not only supporting the scientific community but also fostering innovation in biodiversity research,” said EJT chair and co-founder Steven Dessein, the President at Meise Botanic Garden. “Furthermore the portal allows us to better showcase and measure the impact of EJT’s contributions, making the journal’s role in advancing global biodiversity science more visible and quantifiable. This is a proud moment for EJT and its collaborators.”
EJT was launched in 2011 by a taskforce from the European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT) to support the transition from paper to digital taxonomic journals. Today, EJT is funded and published by a consortium of 10 European natural history institutions, and is endorsed by the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF). EJT covers a large breadth of taxonomic research topics across zoology, botany, mycology, and paleontology. Since 2017, EJT has partnered with Swiss-based organization Plazi (the most active publisher of datasets in GBIF) to convert metadata, treatments and material citations from articles published in PDFs into findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) data formats (XML Taxpub). This has enabled articles to be deposited in the Biodiversity Literature Repository, and mobilized to data infrastructures such as GBIF and Catalogue of Life, and the shared ChecklistBank. By proactively ensuring the quality and proper dissemination of data, EJT enhances the immediate discoverability and usability of its published taxonomic information, making it more valuable for the broader scientific community.
“This hosted portal represents the culmination of many years of collaborative efforts between Plazi, GBIF, and publishers,” said Donat Agosti, President at Plazi. “For the first time it provides a dual-view window: one for GBIF users, allowing them an insightful look into data about specimens, and another for publishers, presenting their rich, quality-controlled data that was traditionally confined within PDFs. The hosted portal provides a novel and unique view of the data in a publication and indeed, for a journal.”
To date, more than 86,000 occurrence records across more than 1,445 datasets have been mobilized to GBIF from EJT records via Plazi and are now accessible through the EJT hosted portal. Impressively, these records contain more than 25 thousand type specimens. Records mobilized by EJT have been widely cited, generating more than 624 citations, including 400 journal articles, 104 reports and 76 preprints and have been used to inform in a range of global research, including climate, health, ecological, and agricultural studies.
“The taxonomic data from EJT digitised articles contribute to the global effort of cataloguing all described organisms on earth,” said Olaf Bánki, Managing Director at Catalogue of Life. “EJT adds to the Catalogue of Life over 5000 scientific names, of which over 2000 are accepted species names and an equal number of synonyms. The EJT hostel portal highlights this work, and provides credit to the taxonomic community responsible for the underlying taxonomic data and occurrences.”
“EJT has been exemplary in handling nomenclatural data, which for zoology means mandatory registration in ZooBank of works published electronically, and the journal has gone further by also registering every new animal name,” said Thomas Pape, President of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. “We are now seeing the natural next step of making the specimen-level occurrence data associated with the scientific names even more discoverable and retrievable, so that the data will be put to use much beyond taxonomy for a better understanding and management of the natural world to the ultimate benefit of human well-being.”