200.000 deposits at the Biodiversity Literature Repository!

The wealth of data encapsulated in scientific publications is a well-guarded secret. The recent discussions around Open Access are centered around open access to the articles, and thus little effort is made to build an index, for example, of all the illustrations therein. This is even more astounding in descriptive sciences, such as biological taxonomy, dealing with discovering and describing the world’s biological diversity, where each article includes an average of 7.2 illustrations.

These illustrations are made for the purpose to illustrate and build a comparative corpus of data to describe and identify – by comparing highly standardized illustrations – the world’s species. From a legal point of view, these figures to not qualify as work – something unique, innovative, novel – and thus are not copyrighted and can be re-used. The citation of them is not just science means, but necessary to understand the origin, not only the author but increasingly the specimen and all the data attached to it.

Based on these presumptions, through a daily data extraction workflow, over 172.000 published, scientific illustrations have been deposited to The Biodiversity Literature Repository. Together with articles, more than 200.000 all together. Each deposit includes citation of the source, but more importantly also taxonomic treatments deposited in TreatmentBank, referring to those illustrations.

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