Biodiversity Literature Repository

"The Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR) has been growing from a community on Zenodo to be a service dedicated to liberate and make open access, FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) data hidden in the hundreds of millions of pages of scholarly publications. It is built on top of Zenodo, a digital repository hosted at CERN, which provides a sustainable and robust infrastructure for long tail research data, which can consist of small datasets that otherwise would be lost. Originally a collaboration between Zenodo, Plazi and Pensoft, BLR began as a repository for taxonomic publications which lacked Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) and thus were effectively orphaned from the network of online citations. As it grew its scope expanded to morphed into a highly interlinked repository that focuses on include illustrations and taxonomic treatments contained in publications with all these content types interlinked among themselves and enhanced with and rich metadata. The source data for BLR are scholarly publications that are most often in PDF or html format but sometimes in XML formats whose structured data facilitates the automated data extraction. The largest data users are the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the United States’ National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Support of BLR comes from the Arcadia Fund and the three partner institutions Zenodo, Plazi and Pensoft."