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
Summary
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
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
