The new value of scientific publications in the digital age

Scientific publications are the means by which scientific knowledge is communicated. In botany as well as all biological sciences, each new species discovered is based on at least one publication including a protologue conformant to the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants. A protologue is based on a standard vocabulary, including a material citation of the type specimen and its hosting institution, generally a figure with the diagnostic characters and a discussion of related species. Increasingly, DNA sequences are cited. The protologues are referenced in subsequent taxonomic treatments, clearly delimited sections of a publications about one particular taxon, and implicit in taxonomic names. Together, these treatments cover the history of the names of the taxon (synonymy), are a very rich source for traits, distribution, and since they are based on physical specimens, an authoritative identification of these specimens. It is assumed that the corpus of biodiversity literature includes a daily growing corpus of 500 million pages, housed in the many libraries of natural history institutions.

In the digital age, these citations of implicit links allow text and datamine these publications, for example to extract the history of names, the use of a physical specimen or a gene sequence. It also allows creation of identifiers for each taxon, taxonomic treatment, figure so that they can be directly cited and reused by anybody, anytime and from anywhere.

In this symposium the current status of scientific publications, and their development in botany will be exposed. This includes the semantic structure of publications and how to make them citable and accessible via dedicated research infrastructures. Efforts to annotate the data in legacy publications and new developments in the world of publishing will be discussed, with an emphasis on how the data is immediately reused by the World Flora Online or GBIF.