Introduction to "Biodiversity Literature Repository"

The Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR) is a research infrastructure (RI) comprising the BLR Community on Zenodo at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), and services to search and retrieve the data (Ocellus, Zenodeo API, BLR website). BLR’s focus is on biodiversity data liberated from scholarly publications, and it uses custom metadata linking to external vocabularies covering the needs of the biodiversity community. This includes taxonomic treatment or figures as well as the deposit of the original article annotated with metadata describing the data contained in the articles itself, as well as related identifiers for figures and treatments therein. The main data import is through TreatmentBank or via publishers such as Pensoft. With over 650,000 deposits, BLR is the single largest community in Zenodo. Its data is widely reused, for example by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). All data in BLR is published under the CC0 Public Domain Dedication, remaining free for anyone to use, anywhere, for any purpose.

BLR’s role in BiCIKL is to provide long-term virtual access to data liberated from scientific literature, as well as to data liberated through transnational access.