Nanopublications at Biodiversity Data Journal to FAIRify knowledge
Authors in Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ) can now incorporate nanopublications within their manuscripts to future-proof the most important assertions on biological taxa and organisms or statements about associations of taxa or organisms and their environments.
Nanopublications complement human-created narratives of scientific knowledge with elementary, machine-actionable, simple and straightforward scientific statements that prompt sharing, finding, accessibility, citability and interoperability.
The machine-actionability of nanopublications is a standard due to each assertion comprising a subject, an object and a predicate (type of relation between the subject and the object), complemented by provenance, authorship and publication information. A unique feature here is that each of the elements is linked to an online resource, such as a controlled vocabulary, ontology or standards.
Using the novel publication format and workflows, developed by high-tech startup Knowledge Pixels and open-access scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft, biodiversity researchers make sure that key scientific statements – the ones underpinning their research work – are efficiently communicated in both human-readable and machine-actionable manner in line with FAIR principles. Thus, their contributions to science are better prepared for a reality driven by AI technology.
So far, the available templates cover a range of associations, including those between taxa and individual organisms, as well as between those and their environments and nucleotide sequences. Follow the links below to see several examples of different types of biodiversity nanopublications:
- Wolves (Canis lupus) occur in forest habitats;
- A grass snake (Natrix natrix) was observed to eat a tree frog (Hyla arborea);
- Ursus meles is a synonym of Meles meles;
- The nucleotide sequence GU682758 can be used to identify the species Araneus diadematus.
Apart from including nanopublications in their manuscripts, while authoring those in the ARPHA Writing Tool, researchers can also employ the newly developed workflow to share standalone nanopublications or annotate already existing scientific publications using the Citation Typing Ontology (CiTO).
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Community feedback is welcome and highly appreciated!
We also remind authors that manuscripts that contain nanopublications cover one of the eligibility criteria for the BiCIKL Project-supported article collection “Linking FAIR biodiversity data through publications: The BiCIKL approach”. You can find more information on the collection’s webpage: https://doi.org/10.3897/bdj.coll.209.
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You can find more about the nanopublication workflow and format and its advantages on the Pensoft blog.