Abstract

The Global Registry of Biodiversity Repositories is an online metadata resource for biodiversity collections, the institutions that contain them, and associated staff members. The registry provides contact and address information, characteristics of the institutions and collections using controlled vocabularies and free-text descripitons, links to related websites, unique identifiers for each institution and collection record, text fields for loan and use policies, and a variety of other descriptors. Each institution record includes an institutionCode that must be unique, and each collection record must have a collectionCode that is unique within that institution. The registry is populated with records imported from the largest similar registries and more can be harmonized and added. Doing so will require community input and curation and would produce a truly comprehensive and unifying information resource.

Highlights

  • Taxonomy and the monographs and journals that publish them are founded on the documentation of specimens, their traits, and their distribution in time and space

  • The reproducibility of scientific findings has recently emerged as a critical issue for science policy (Yaffe 2015) and it applies to observational fields like taxonomy as well as experimental disciplines like chemistry. (Arnett 1970a, Arnett 1970b), and more recently (Chavan and Penev 2011), have argued that the raw data taken from voucher specimens are sufficiently important, in and of themselves, to merit publication, respectively, in “data documents” and “data papers”, separate from their subsequent analyses and interpretation in scholarly articles

  • As collections specialists focus on digitizing specimens, we may be at risk of omitting critical pieces of information about voucher specimens cited in the literature, such as the location of the specimens and information on how to access them

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Summary

Introduction

Taxonomy and the monographs and journals that publish them (like this one) are founded on the documentation of specimens, their traits, and their distribution in time and space. (Arnett 1970a, Arnett 1970b), and more recently (Chavan and Penev 2011), have argued that the raw data taken from voucher specimens are sufficiently important, in and of themselves, to merit publication, respectively, in “data documents” and “data papers”, separate from their subsequent analyses and interpretation in scholarly articles. In taxonomy, these data are taxonomic identifications, traits, occurrence locations and dates, and images, all associated with unique specimen identifiers. As collections specialists focus on digitizing specimens, we may be at risk of omitting critical pieces of information about voucher specimens cited in the literature, such as the location of the specimens and information on how to access them

Methods
Conclusion

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