Are publications on zoological taxonomy under attack?

Taxonomy is essential to biological sciences and the priority field in face of the biodiversity crisis. The industry of scientific publications has made extensive promotion and display of bibliometric indexes, resulting in side effects such as the Journal Impact Factor™ (JIF) mania. Inadequacies of the widely used indexes to assess taxonomic publications are among the impediments for the progress of this field.

Relationship between conservation biology and ecology shown through machine reading of 32,000 articles.

Conservation biology was founded on the idea that efforts to save nature depend on a scientific understanding of how it works. It sought to apply ecological principles to conservation problems. We investigated whether the relationship between these fields has changed over time through machine reading the full texts of 32,000 research articles published in 16 ecology and conservation biology journals.

Recent developments in scholarly publishing to improve research practices in the life sciences.

We outline recent developments in scholarly publishing that we think will improve the working environment and career prospects for life scientists. Most prominently, we discuss two key developments. (1) Life scientists are now embracing a preprint culture leading to rapid dissemination of research findings.

Ex situ conservation of plant diversity in the world's botanic gardens.

Botanic gardens conserve plant diversity ex situ and can prevent extinction through integrated conservation action. Here we quantify how that diversity is conserved in ex situ collections across the world's botanic gardens. We reveal that botanic gardens manage at least 105,634 species, equating to 30% of all plant species diversity, and conserve over 41% of known threatened species.

Sampling diverse characters improves phylogenies: Craniodental and postcranial characters of vertebrates often imply different trees.

Morphological cladograms of vertebrates are often inferred from greater numbers of characters describing the skull and teeth than from postcranial characters. This is either because the skull is believed to yield characters with a stronger phylogenetic signal (i.e.

Enriched biodiversity data as a resource and service.

Background: Recent years have seen a surge in projects that produce large volumes of structured, machine-readable biodiversity data. To make these data amenable to processing by generic, open source "data enrichment" workflows, they are increasingly being represented in a variety of standards-compliant interchange formats. Here, we report on an initiative in which software developers and taxonomists came together to address the challenges and highlight the opportunities in the enrichment of such biodiversity data by engaging in intensive, collaborative software development: The Biodiversity Data Enrichment Hackathon.

Sharing and re-use of phylogenetic trees (and associated data) to facilitate synthesis.

Background: Recently, various evolution-related journals adopted policies to encourage or require archiving of phylogenetic trees and associated data. Such attention to practices that promote sharing of data reflects rapidly improving information technology, and rapidly expanding potential to use this technology to aggregate and link data from previously published research. Nevertheless, little is known about current practices, or best practices, for publishing trees and associated data so as to promote re-use.