News
Biodiversity Data Journal launches GBIF hosted portal
Published 3/10/2025
The scientific publication becomes the first of many titles under the Pensoft masthead expected to provide GBIF-enabled data access
The Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ) has become the second scientific journal to take advantage of the GBIF hosted portals programme. Envisioned as the first in a series to support Pensoft-published journals, BDJ's portal is the programme's 28th production release and follows closely behind the European Journal of Taxonomy's hosted portal which launched last month. Taken together, the sites set a key precedent for scientific publishers seeking to advance and support the reuse of FAIR biodiversity data using open infrastructure.
"The launch of BDJ's hosted portal builds on numerous longstanding collaborations with GBIF to advance the publication, dissemination and reuse of FAIR biodiversity data," said Lyubomir Penev, founder and chief executive officer of Pensoft. "The programme will provide a scalable solution for more than thirty of the journals we publish thanks to our partnership with Plazi, and will foster greater connectivity between scientific research and the evidence that supports it."
BDJ is a peer-reviewed online publication focused on biodiversity-related research on any taxon from any part of the world. Pensoft and BDJ are pioneers in the growth and development of data papers, a scholarly format in which the peer review of metadata offer academic credit for data curation activities. The journal has also hosted publications resulting from three GBIF-sponsored calls for data papers, producing a special issue on the Biota of Russia and another on the Biota of Northern Eurasia.
BDJ's history of innovation includes the ARPHA Writing Tool, whose optimized workflows support authors and reviewers across the entire manuscript life cycle. Flexible article templates that comply with nomenclatural codes and Darwin Core standards fulfill commitments to FAIR and open data on biodiversity.
The newly launched portal enables seamless integration of published articles and associated data elements with GBIF-mediated records, enhancing the visibility and dissemination of biodiversity data for authors and publishers. Users can explore more than 278,000 occurrence records across 837 datasets published to date through BDJ.
Records published alongside research in BDJ have in turn supported nearly 900 GBIF-enabled research papers. Key patterns also emerge from data visualizations via a customized dashboard, maps and data clustering feature that enables the detection of related GBIF records. The BDJ portal helps researchers explore the information that supports its main and secondary scientific findings by providing a complete view of research results and their impacts.
"Since its launch in 2013, BDJ has pioneered publication of FAIR biodiversity data and offered scientists new forms of academic recognition for their work," said Vince Smith, BDJ's editor-in-chief and head of digital, data and informatics at the Natural History Museum, London. "This new hosted portal exemplifies the journal's commitment to innovation, further streamlining data publication and accelerating data reuse and leveraging the flexibility of GBIF's hosted portals to empower the next generation of biodiversity scientists."
By directly linking peer-reviewed articles to their associated data, this initiative promotes the open exchange of biodiversity knowledge and reduces barriers to data use and reuse. The Pensoft and EJT portals also provide examples for implementing the Disentis Roadmap 2024, developed to catalyze commitments for liberating biodiversity data locked in research publications to support international science-policy commitments through the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
About GBIF hosted portals
The hosted portals programme launched in 2022 to leverage GBIF's infrastructure in lowering the technical threshold for visualizing subsets of biodiversity data shared through the GBIF network. By offering a free, simple, branded and fully customizable website, the programme offers a scalable solution to support Participant nodes and other partners to share biodiversity data from and for their communities.