How BLR Works

BLR works by providing access to parts of publications that are cited within the corpus of biodiversity literature. A taxonomic name usage implicitly cites a clearly delimited section of a scientific publication, called a taxonomic treatment. A taxonomic treatment contains further citations, to other treatments and thus, to publications, to figures, specimens in a collection, or even DNA sequences.

The corpus of biodiversity literature includes tens of millions of figures and taxonomic treatments, which are, therefore, the fundamental building blocks on which knowledge of the world’s biological diversity is based. To make them more open accessible, the BLR team designed the upload types for the deposit of figures and articles with enhanced metadata, For taxonomic treatments, Zenodo created a new resource subtype of the resource type “publication” which maps to DataCite’s general resource type “text”. This allows to mint for all the figures and taxonomic treatments Digital Object Identifiers (DOI).

All publications after 1999 are accessible according to the licenses assigned by their publishers. Publications prior to 2000 are open access. Taxonomic treatments and figures being scientific data, are thus not copyrightable, and since extracted from legally accessible sources, are thus made openly accessible.

The development and maintenance of BLR is organized during biannual sprints at CERN where all partners participate.

The data use is open and depositing of new research related data is free.