[Science News] - The European Journal of Taxonomy launches its GBIF-hosted portal
The European Journal of Taxonomy (EJT) is a leading open-access journal dedicated to taxonomic research. Since its inception, EJT has provided a high-quality platform for publishing new species descriptions and biodiversity data, ensuring broad accessibility. The journal is supported by the EJT Consortium, a network of ten European natural history institutes and botanic gardens, including Meise Botanic Garden, one of its founding members.
EJT has taken a significant step toward enhancing biodiversity data accessibility by becoming the first scientific journal to launch a GBIF-hosted portal. This initiative significantly improves the visibility and usability of taxonomic and occurrence data, setting an important model for other biodiversity publishers.
Since 2017, EJT has collaborated with Plazi to convert metadata, taxonomic treatments, and material citations from its publications into FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data. This process ensures that taxonomic information —previously locked within static PDFs— becomes an active part of global biodiversity data infrastructures. Articles published in the EJT are deposited in the Biodiversity Literature Repository and made accessible through platforms such as GBIF, Catalogue of Life, and ChecklistBank, significantly improving their discoverability and impact.
The new GBIF-hosted portal makes an impressive volume of data easily accessible: more than 86,000 occurrence records spanning 1,445 published datasets, including over 25,000 type specimens. Data mobilised by EJT have already been cited over 600 times across multiple research domains, including climate science, health, ecology, and agriculture, demonstrating the wide-ranging influence of EJT’s contributions.
With this portal, users can now explore powerful search tools, data clustering features, and interactive dashboards that provide new ways to analyse and visualize taxonomic data. These innovations move beyond the static format of traditional PDFs, making taxonomic research more dynamic and accessible to the scientific community.
“EJT has always aimed to be at the forefront of open-access taxonomic publishing. The new GBIF-hosted portal exemplifies this mission,” said EJT Chair and co-founder Steven Dessein, CEO of Meise Botanic Garden. “By transforming material citation records into dynamic, reusable data, we are not only supporting the scientific community but also fostering innovation in biodiversity research. Additionally, the portal allows us to better showcase and measure EJT’s contributions, making the journal’s role in advancing global biodiversity science more visible and quantifiable. This is a proud milestone for EJT and its collaborators.”
More information:
EJT website: https://europeanjournaloftaxonomy.eu
EJT GBIF-hosted portal: https://data.europeanjournaloftaxonomy.eu