A paradigm shift in biodiversity publishing: Mobilization, mark up, reuse and integration of small data

One of the major flaws of conventional publishing of biodiversity research is the generally low accessibility and reuse of the published information and data. The continuing practice of publishing in non-machine-readable formats, such as paper and PDF, is one of the five  causes of the “Publishing bottleneck”, a phenomenon comparable to the “taxonomic impediment” in biodiversity research.  Further motivation for shifting the current model in scholarly publishing is the growing demand from funders for open access to data combined with the rapidly increasing amount of  data due to the intensification of methods for scientific exploration, e.g. genome sequencing, large-scale inventories and accumulation of ecological data, low uptake and inconsistent policies for data publishing, pressure of funders and administrators to publish in “high-impact” journals, and increasing difficulties with peer-review, due to rising volume of publications and increasing time-pressure on reviewers.

The new paradigm in  modern digital publishing is to remove the restrictions of the print/PDF age and opening data that underpin research and make it easily available for re-use. The  Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ) (www.pensoft.net/journals/bdj) and associated  Pensoft Writing Tool (PWT) (www.pwt.pensoft.net)  launched within  the EU-funded project ViBRANT (www.vbrant.eu) provide the first e-infrastructure and work flow ever to complete the full publishing life cycle within a single, fully XML-based, online collaborative platform. BDJ publishes papers in all scientific disciplines of biodiversity science. To increase the quality of published research text and data submitted to BDJ will be peer-reviewed by the scientific community through a novel  community-based pre-publication  peer-review and possibilities to comment after publication (post-publication peer-review).