Arcadia Fund supports Plazi in its endeavor to rediscover known biodiversity | 16/05/2022

"The Swiss-based Plazi NGO has received a grant of EUR 1.5 million from Arcadia Fund– a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin – to further develop its Biodiversity Literature Repository(BLR) established in collaboration with Zenodo, the open science repository hosted and managed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and the open-access scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft. The Arcadia-supported project helps rediscover known biodiversity by liberating taxonomic treatments, material citations and images trapped in scholarly biodiversity publications, and making them FAIR and open. The project engages the community in the huge and decisive challenge to understand and preserve the biodiversity of our planet. Our knowledge about biodiversity is largely imprisoned in a corpus of more than 500 million pages of scientific research publications that is growing daily. Many of these publications are only available in print, and others are PDFs behind a paywall. These data are not FAIR; they are not findable, accessible, interoperable, or reusable. They cannot be linked to new digital resources such as gene sequences, citizen science observations, taxonomic names, or specimens of digitized natural history collections. Extracting and using text and data from such PDFs comes at very high cost, if possible at all. Through itsTreatmentBank production service, Plazi is a leader in providing access to biodiversity data liberated from publications. Thanks to the Arcadia Fund support and in collaboration with Pensoft, Zenodo and the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics Literature Services (SIBiLS), Plazi provides access to over 750,000 taxonomic treatments, 450,000 figures and over 1.1 million material citations from over 53,000 publications in the BLR...."