[Taxacom] Building the index to taxonomic illustrations

[Donat Agosti]

The Biodiversity Literature Repository<http://biolitrepo.org/> (BLR), a community at CERN<https://cern.org/>'S open science repository Zenodo<https://zenodo.org/>, has recently reached a benchmark of 200,000 deposits, including 172,000 scientific illustrations and over 32,000 publications. All the deposits have in the average six links to related items, that is the source publication, cited digital objects identifiers for publications or other items such as illustrations in the publication, and most importantly to the related taxonomic treatments in TreatmenBank<http://treatmentbank.org/>. All the deposits can be cited using a digital object identifier (DOI) which is minted for deposits that have none, otherwise the original DOI is kept.
Currently, all the deposits can be found using the Zenodo interface<https://zenodo.org/communities/biosyslit/search?page=1&size=20>, which makes navigating slightly difficult. As alternative, we are offering a beta tool, Ocellus<https://ocellus.punkish.org/?q=perlidae&page=1>, that allows using simple search terms and retrieving images. For advanced users, an API exists which hopefully will be used to create your own applications or viewers (see a brief description<http://plazi.org/news/beitrag/expanded-access-to-images-in-the-biodiversity-literature-repository/b86d1880198c5c7315c2d38ae3a82820/>).
The deposits are handled and uploaded mainly via Plazi<http://plazi.org/> and Pensoft<https://pensoft.net/> - an alternative to view the daily input is here<http://tb.plazi.org/GgServer/static/newToday.html> and through all the Pensoft publications<https://pensoft.net/browse_journals>, or unless new species, also at GBIF<https://gbif.org/> under the respective species pages, hopefully soon including also the images in their gallery.
BLR is a unique, open index of published scientific illustrations and to the respective publications. It unravels the potential of having access to all scientific published illustrations - and taxonomic treatments - open access and accessible. It finally shows the value of hundreds of years of creating comparative, standardized illustrations across taxa.
Zenodo is a ICZN certified repository. It is also part of Europe's fledgling DiSSCo<http://dissco.eu/> project. BLR's deposits are 51% of all the deposits - but occupying only 1.2% of the physical storage space. Through its nature, Zenodo is wide open to be a main contributor to build the index of taxonomic illustrations and digital objects.
More here<http://plazi.org/news/beitrag/200000-deposits-at-the-biodiversity-literature-repository/e7f04bfb78ad7910350d9440125cbccf/> and here<http://plazi.org/news/beitrag/pensoft-and-plazi-join-forces-to-expedit-building-the-openbioddiv/787e6dda2caaa3038c39d026c266d0fa/>.

Donat