The European Journal of Taxonomy (EJT)—a leading open-access journal for taxonomic research—has become the first scientific journal to launch a GBIF-hosted portal. This sets a precedent for other academic publishers to follow.
This launch marks an important shift toward improving the access, reuse, and interoperability of material citations. They were previously locked in static PDFs. Now, through published datasets, these citations are widely disseminated and linked to global biodiversity data platforms.
Moreover, users can explore advanced features such as data clustering. It helps identify related type specimens and connect records from different sources. Combined with powerful search tools and dashboard visualizations, this functionality significantly broadens the reach of EJT data within GBIF. It is especially useful for taxonomic treatments and related literature.
“European Journal of Taxonomy has always aimed to be at the forefront of open-access taxonomic publishing. The new GBIF-hosted portal exemplifies this mission. By transforming our material citation records into dynamic, reusable data, we are not only supporting the scientific community but also fostering innovation in biodiversity research,” said EJT chair and co-founder Steven Dessein, the President at Meise Botanic Garden. “Furthermore the portal allows us to better showcase and measure the impact of EJT’s contributions, making the journal’s role in advancing global biodiversity science more visible and quantifiable. This is a proud moment for EJT and its collaborators.”
It was the European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT) who launched in 2011 the European Journal of Taxonomy. The main purpose was to support the transition from paper to digital taxonomic journals.
Today, a consortium of 10 European natural history institutions funds and publishes EJT, and the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) endorses it. EJT covers a large breadth of taxonomic research topics across zoology, botany, mycology, and paleontology.
Since 2017, the European Journal of Taxonomy has partnered with the Swiss-based organization Plazi. Together, they convert metadata, treatments, and material citations from PDF articles into FAIR data formats (XML Taxpub).
This has enabled articles to deposite in the Biodiversity Literature Repository, and mobilized to data infrastructures such as GBIF and Catalogue of Life, and the shared ChecklistBank.
EJT enhances the immediate discoverability and usability of its published taxonomic information, making it more valuable for the broader scientific community. It proactively ensure the quality and proper dissemination of data.
“This hosted portal crowns many years of collaborative efforts by Plazi, GBIF, and publishers,” said Donat Agosti, President at Plazi. “For the first time, it offers a dual-view window: one lets GBIF users explore insightful specimen data, and the other showcases rich, quality-controlled data that publishers traditionally confined within PDFs. The hosted portal delivers a novel and unique way to view data in a publication and, indeed, in a journal.”
To date, EJT and Plazi have mobilized over 86,000 occurrence records to GBIF using Plazi’s workflows and infrastructure. Users can access these records through the EJT-hosted portal, which spans more than 1,445 datasets from taxonomic literature.
The dataset notably includes over 25,000 type specimens, which serve as crucial biodiversity references from scientific descriptions. Researchers have widely cited EJT-mobilized records in academic and institutional research, generating over 624 total citations.
They have published 400 journal articles, 104 official reports, and 76 preprints across various global research and policy fields.
Researchers have used the data to support global studies on climate, health, ecosystems, and agriculture, showing its broad value and relevance.
“The taxonomic data from EJT digitised articles contribute to the global effort of cataloguing all described organisms on earth,” said Olaf Bánki, Managing Director at Catalogue of Life. “EJT adds to the Catalogue of Life over 5000 scientific names. Over 2000 of them are accepted species names and an equal number of synonyms. The EJT hostel portal highlights this work, and provides credit to the taxonomic community responsible for the underlying taxonomic data and occurrences.”
“European Journal of Taxonomy is exemplary in handling nomenclatural data. For zoology this means mandatory registration in ZooBank of works published electronically. The journal has gone further by also registering every new animal name,” said Thomas Pape, President of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. “We are now seeing the natural next step of making the specimen-level occurrence data associated with the scientific names even more discoverable and retrievable. That way the data will be put to use much beyond taxonomy for a better understanding and management of the natural world to the ultimate benefit of human well-being.”
