The Disentis Roadmap 2024: Vision
“By 2035, the power of biodiversity knowledge from research publications will be fully leveraged within an open science framework, including unencumbered data discovery, access, and re-use across scientific disciplines and policy applications.”
Specific 2035 goals:
- 100% of major public biodiversity research funders and academic publishers will enforce and enable FAIR data publication
- Biodiversity publications will be accessible in machine-actionable formats, with all non-copyrightable parts of articles flowing into publicly-accessible repositories, thereby streamlining the re-use of this knowledge for further research, for science policy platforms (e.g., the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, IPBES), and ultimately for the wider public.
- Published research on biodiversity will be 'fully AI ready', that is openly available for AI training and properly labelled for ingestion by machine-learning models, based on well-curated and semantically structured data, within appropriate ethical and legal frameworks.
- A dedicated portion of biodiversity-related research and infrastructure funding will be allocated towards ensuring that the above goals regarding access to biodiversity data and knowledge are met.
Key actions to support the Disentis Roadmap:
Short term (3 years)
- Develop empirical use cases to demonstrate the value (costs and benefits) of biodiversity data liberation, aiming to encourage early adopters among relevant institutions
- Develop minimum standards for machine-actionable publications to benchmark the extent of knowledge 'liberation' contained in different types of biodiversity literature
- Define metrics to evaluate progress towards implementation of the Disentis Roadmap goals, including 'FAIR' data criteria, and apply these to a range of publishing platforms and other elements of biodiversity data workflows
Medium term (5 years)
- Create communities of practice that curate 'liberated' publications in a given domain, applying best practices and monitoring progress
- Build efficient workflows through existing research infrastructures (e.g. BHL, Biodiversity Literature Repository, Zenodo, SIBiLS, GBIF, OBIS) to ensure sustainable access to open biodiversity knowledge, information and data, including the establishment of appropriate governance, funding and legal frameworks
- Develop a global training programme on how to maximize the re-usability of biodiversity research publications, teaching students and younger professionals about the value of liberating biodiversity data
- Engage the academic publishing industry through the influence of editors and professional societies to publish machine-actionable knowledge
- Establish links with collection data infrastructures (e.g. DiSSCo, iDigBio) and raise awareness for the role of specimens as a basis for permanently linking research data
Long term (10 years)
- Recognize and reward FAIR biodiversity data sharing in the criteria for scientific research assessment in major research institutions and academic journals (e.g. through the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA)
- Convert published and semantically annotated data into biodiversity knowledge graphs based on Linked Open Data using advanced, AI-assisted tools and services (e.g. triple stores, nanopublications, and others)
- Support advanced publishing models that provide the data in semantically structured and machine-actionable formats at the date of publication
Early milestones for development of the 'Biodiversity Libroscope'
Year 1:
- Confirm signatories of the outline roadmap (this document)
- Author White Paper based on the proceedings of the Disentis Symposium and publish it in a relevant journal
- Assess existing use cases demonstrating the steps necessary for making biodiversity publications available as digitally-accessible knowledge, formulate detailed recommendations based on these cases
- Organize a series of meetings to discuss technologies for building of the “Libroscope”
- Seek funding for resources
- Define digitally accessible knowledge format and resolution output from scientific publications
- Launch action plan at joint TDWG/GEO BON/GBIF/OBIS Living Data conference in Colombia, Oct 2025
Year 2:
- Organize meeting to agree upon specific actions among academic publishers, funders, research infrastructures
- Establish working group to monitor and refine the roadmap
- Communicate progress and seek wider political support at CBD COP17 meeting in Yerevan, Armenia (Q4 2026).
- Provide digital accessible knowledge from 200 biodiversity journals, and publications covering five target communities in GBIF and BiodiversityPMC
Year 3: Start the implementation of the “Biodiversity Libroscope” as a centrally orchestrated ecosystem of:
- services for data liberation, annotation, dissemination
- services for conversions into FAIR Linked Open Data
- services for semantic authoring and publishing
- literature search and exploration as well as linking from and to other bibliographic tools
- biodiversity literature knowledge graph
- interlinking the Biodiversity Libroscope to trusted data resources within and outside the biodiversity domain
- generation and re-use of purpose-specific datasets.
The Biodiversity Libroscope will fill the much-needed niche of next-generation literature tools that will deliver high-quality data and other research objects (images, tables, references, taxonomic treatments) on biological taxa (morphology, identification, taxonomy, ecology, biology), their relations between each other and with the environment, their impact and importance for nature conservation, ecosystem services, and human activities in general.
The Libroscope will enable linking the data, information and knowledge contained in literature and other electronic resources to uniquely-identified components, re-usable in research and policy covering biodiversity and other domains, thus enabling integration of publications into a comprehensive global biodiversity knowledge Graph.