FAIRer knowledge about biodiversity with AI-friendly nanopublications at Biodiversity Data Journal

Earlier this year, in a pilot project, the teams of high-tech startup Knowledge Pixels and open-access scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft released a novel workflow to publicly share and future-proof scientific findings by means of nanopublications.

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. By making it easier to trace individual findings back to their origin and/or follow-up updates, it also helps to better understand the provenance of biodiversity data.

These semantic statements expressed in community-agreed terms, openly available through links to controlled vocabularies, ontologies and standards, are not only freely accessible to everyone in both human-readable and machine-actionable formats, but also easy-to-digest for computer algorithms and AI-powered assistants.

Now, the collaborators – also partly supported by the Horizon 2020-funded project BiCIKL (abbreviation for Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library) – have built up on a pilot workflow already launched in the Biodiversity Data Journal – to create a specialised nanopublication solution to address the need for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data in the biodiversity science domain. 

In their studies, researchers need to use and refer to extensive and diverse biodiversity data at once, e.g. information about groups of organisms and their classification, collections, authors and genetic sequences. However, those would normally be scattered across a vast number of articles or belong to dissociated databases. This is a major and widely recognised issue in biodiversity science, which is currently stagnating progress not only in building up the world’s knowledge about the natural world around us, but also impeding biodiversity conservation and ecosystem restoration.

Using the newly released nanopublication workflow, biodiversity researchers can now incorporate nanopublications within their manuscripts to future-proof their most important assertions on biological taxa and organisms or statements about associations of taxa or organisms and their environments. 

In addition, the authors can also create standalone nanopublications that comment or derive from already existing research journals published in an academic journal or another citable source (e.g. expert database), regardless of the author of the source. 

“With the nanopublication format, authors make sure that key scientific statements – the ones underpinning their research work – are efficiently communicated in a machine-actionable and FAIR manner. Thus, their contributions to science become future-proof for a reality driven by AI technology,”

explains Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO at Pensoft.

“Biodiversity is the ideal field for this pilot exploring the next steps in scientific publishing. Biodiversity and its neighbouring fields have produced a remarkable number of high-quality resources, such as controlled vocabularies and databases, which we can now build upon. Moreover, many Biodiversity researchers have shown to be very open to such new methods and are enthusiastic about working together to build a more powerful ecosystem for scientific knowledge sharing, and we share their enthusiasm,”

says Tobias Kuhn, CTO and co-founder of Knowledge Pixels. 

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You can find more about the nanopublication workflow and its advantages to biodiversity scientists on the Pensoft blog and the Biodiversity Data Journal website.

Journal publishing platform ARPHA partners with content recommendation engine TrendMD

Thanks to the new collaboration between content recommendation engine TrendMD and journal publishing platform ARPHA, readers of all journals under Pensoft’s imprint, as well as those using the white-label publishing solution provided by the platform, will be given a useful list of recommended articles related to the study they are reading.

The new widget is to save the users a great amount of time, by simply pointing them to the most relevant papers on the topic from across a constantly expanding network of of peer-reviewed articles and research news.

While nearly 8,000 new scholarly articles are published each day, it is basically impossible staying up-to-date with the news from a single scientific field, let alone doing cross-disciplinary research. Furthermore, sifting out the quality literature is another painstaking activity no academic is looking forward to. Hence, TrendMD comes as the sensible solution to help a reader find the most relevant and fine studies on a particular topic. The widget’s recommendations are based on the topic a user is currently reading, what papers they have read in the past, and the articles others with similar interests have sought out – all available from the most authoritative and quality journals in the world.

“TrendMD is excited to welcome Pensoft, a highly innovative, open access, online publishing platform, to the TrendMD network! This partnership will bring over 5,000 open access articles and books in the field of natural history, predominantly taxonomy and organismal biology, to TrendMD’s ever expanding network,” says Paul Kudlow, CEO and co-founder of TrendMD.

“In our continuing effort to develop and implement the most novel tools and workflows in academic publishing, at Pensoft we are pleased to have integrated our journal publishing platform ARPHA with the new-age scholarly innovation that is TrendMD’s tool, so that our readers have an easy and constant access to the most relevant and best-quality research,” says Pensoft’s CEO and founder Prof. Lyubomir Penev.

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Additional information

About TrendMD:TrendMD is a content recommendation engine for scholarly publishers, which powers personalized recommendations for thousands of sites. TrendMD looks beyond just related links to help people discover, read, and cite interesting scholarly content from journals and websites through personalized recommendations.

Publishing platform ARPHA partners with Altmetric to track online attention to research

With a research output mentioned online every 1.8 seconds, it only makes sense for the science community to grow curious of how they could access the knowledge of this public interest to better and build on their work.

Journal publishing platform ARPHA, developed by academic publisher Pensoft, has partnered with Altmetric to enable authors, readers and other users to track the online shares and discussions relating to each research output in journals published on ARPHA.

Thanks to the integration, a single click in the top menu of an article reveals the Altmetric donut visualisation, which provides an at-a-glance summary of the attention the item has received. The colours of the donut reflect the source of the attention, and the user can click on the image to be taken to the Altmetric details page, which provides a record of all of the mentions. Data is updated in real-time to provide insight into how the item is being received and shared.

To deliver such detailed information, Altmetric follows 2,000 mainstream media outlets in over 30 languages, social networks, public policy documents, post-publication peer-review forums, online reference managers, blogs, and Wikipedia.

As a result, all authors, readers, editors and funders can easily and immediately track the popularity, reception and impact of each of their studies.

“Having built an extensive portfolio of innovations as a technological provider, we are always looking forward to making yet another effort at providing our users with the best-quality experience. The integration of Altmetric data provides us with another opportunity to do exactly this,” says Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof Lyubomir Penev.

“Furthermore, the science community has long been in need of a more adequate measure of the influence and engagement of individual research outputs, and Altmetric provides this.”

Altmetric’s Founder Euan Adie adds, “We’re excited to see the Altmetric badges being implemented across the ARPHA platform. Helping researchers get credit for their work and demonstrate its reach and influence is a core part of what we do, and this integration provides new opportunities to do so.”

The Altmetric badges and associated details pages are now available for all articles within Pensoft’s journals, as well as the journals using the white-label publishing available from ARPHA.

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Additional information:

About Altmetric:

Altmetric was founded in 2011 and has made it a mission to track and analyze the online activity around scholarly literature. Altmetric tracks what people are saying about research outputs online and works with some of the biggest publishers, funders, and institutions around the world to deliver this data in an accessible and reliable format. Altmetric is supported by Digital Science. Visit http://www.altmetric.com for more information, and follow on Twitter @altmetric.