World's biodiversity literature made freely available online

SciELO integrates the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a consortium that is digitizing the collections of leading research institutions around the world for online open access.

By Elton Alisson

Agência FAPESP – Collections of books and other print publications on biodiversity that are held by the libraries of leading research institutions around the world, including Brazil, are being digitized and made freely available to internet users everywhere by the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), an international consortium of natural history and botanical libraries.

Launched in 2006 in the United States with the aim of making the world’s biodiversity literature available for open access and facilitating its use in research projects and for other purposes, the initiative has since expanded to form the Global BHL Network (gBHL), covering South Africa, Australia, Brazil, China, Egypt, the US, and Europe. Brazil participates through the BHL-SciELO Network.

Led by FAPESP’s SciELO Program, the network involves BIOTA, another of FAPESP’s programs, as well as the Brazilian Zoology Society (SBZ), and the information systems and libraries of the Zoobotanical Foundation (FZB), the National Library Foundation (FBN), the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), the Butantan Institute (IB), the São Paulo State Botanical Institute (IBOT), the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden Research Institute (JBRJ), the National Museum, the Emilio Goeldi Museum of Pará (MPEG), the University of São Paulo’s Zoology Museum (MZ-USP), and the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR). The first meeting of gBHL in a Latin American country was held at the Butantan Institute and FAPESP on May 6-8, 2015.

“The idea of creating the BHL-SciELO Network arose from a joint project by SBZ, MZ-USP and SciELO. Its implementation was discussed in 2006 at an assembly of researchers in the field held during COP-8 in Curitiba,” said Abel Packer, who heads the SciELO Program, in his opening address to the meeting at FAPESP. “Since then, we’ve traveled a long road, culminating with the launch of BHL-SciELO in 2010.” COP-8 was the eighth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

The network’s creation and development were funded under the SciELO Biodiversity Project, supported by FAPESP as part of the BIOTA Program, as well as through projects supported by the Ministry of the Environment’s Biodiversity & Forestry Department to digitize collections of essential biodiversity literature held by Brazilian libraries.

“The Environment Ministry paid for the infrastructure to digitize documents held by libraries in the participating institutions,” Packer said. “FAPESP funds the organization, treatment, and publication of the information.”

According to Packer, approximately 25% of Brazil’s scientific production relating to biodiversity is published by Brazilian journals, most of which are indexed by SciELO and made available via the web on an open-access basis.

However, a number of relevant documents are available only in physical form from libraries of universities and research institutions. “We want to fill this gap in public access to the Brazilian biodiversity literature with as comprehensive an effort as possible to digitize all the relevant printed material and publish it online so that it can interoperate with articles and journals published by SciELO and other information sources,” Packer said.

“Another goal is to make this material available globally by inserting it into the international flow of information via gBHL.”

In the past three years, 869 documents from four collections have been digitized: 232 from MZ- USP, 176 from JBRJ, 285 from IB, and 176 from MPEG. Indexing is ongoing.

The BHL-SciELO network aims to have more than 2,000 relevant documents on biodiversity digitized by the end of 2016. “We reckon between 3,500 and 4,000 documents would have to be digitized in order to assure exhaustive coverage of the relevant biodiversity literature that is held in physical form by Brazilian research institutions,” Packer said.

SciELO currently offers 45 indexed open-access journals on biodiversity, published in six Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico. The virtual library also holds a biodiversity legislation collection, to be updated by the end of 2015.

Another new feature of SciELO is a biodiversity thesaurus in Portuguese, English, and Spanish. “The thesaurus will contribute to the automatic indexing of content and will enable users to search for keywords in all three languages,” Packer said.

Access to qualified information

For Carlos Joly, a professor at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in São Paulo State and head of FAPESP’s BIOTA Program, access to qualified information about biodiversity is a tool of paramount importance to the Brazilian and international scientific community. Lack of such access is one of the main obstacles to diagnosing biodiversity in different parts of the world.

“Globally speaking, information about biodiversity is fragmented, dispersed and often hard to access because it’s available only in unpublished literature, such as theses, monographs, and reports,” Joly said in his presentation to the event.

“Even the published data often can’t be used to inform public policy because it’s so scattered. This is why, as part of FAPESP’s BIOTA Program, we developed a mechanism for compiling highly technical information combined with a cartographic database, all of which is available online. Moreover, it’s all open access so that it can be used to formulate and enhance public policy.”

The BIOTA Program’s biodiversity database, known as SinBIOTA, contains all of the available taxonomic information on the species that have been collected in the biomes of São Paulo State, including details of where, how, in what conditions, and by whom they were collected.

SinBIOTA is part of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), with which BHL also plans to integrate.

“If all goes according to plan, the GBIF database will be used by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services (IPBES) to perform regional diagnoses,” said Joly, who is a member of the IPBES Multidisciplinary Expert Panel (MEP). IPBES was established in 2012 as an independent intergovernmental body open to all member countries of the United Nations with the mission of systematizing scientific knowledge on biodiversity for the purpose of informing public policy worldwide.

“We’re implementing an ambitious work program at IPBES,” Joly said. “One of the obstacles we’ve identified to diagnosing biodiversity in different parts of the world is a lack of access to qualified information. The GBIF and BHL will certainly be strategic partners in bridging this gap.”

So far, the BHL has digitized more than 45 million pages from over 159,000 publications held by the consortium’s member libraries.

“The number of page visits surpassed 927,000 in 2014,” said Nancy Gwinn, BHL Members Council Chair, Global BHL Secretary, and Director of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries.