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Enumerate research questions (fix issue #55)
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nickynicolson committed Mar 23, 2023
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2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion 04-introduction.md
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Expand Up @@ -30,5 +30,5 @@ A foundational event of the Open Access movement was the Budapest Open Access In
| OA - Diamond | Openly licensed, but neither the author nor the reader pays charges | Publisher | European Journal of Taxonomy |
Table: Types of open access (OA) described, with indication of who bears the costs and examples of publications or archives used in botanical nomenclature. {#tbl:id tag="T.1"}

Here we explore patterns in publication of the names of vascular plants using data from the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) and the International Plant Names Index (IPNI), along with data from global aggregators, to examine the degree and global distribution of Open Access publication of these important data. We make recommendations we feel will help better support work to document and conserve plant diversity for downstream use and suggest next steps for research and improvement of these data sets.
Here we explore patterns in publication of the names of vascular plants using publication data from the International Plant Names Index (IPNI), along with data from global specimend data aggregators with taxonomy and distribution from the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP). We examine the degree and global distribution of Open Access publication of these important data, to answer three research questions (1) how has open access publishing been adopted in the publication of names, (2) does open access availability vary with the distribution of the taxon and (3) does the location of the data provider responsible for mobilisation of digitised type specimen metadata correlate with the natural range of the taxon. We make recommendations we feel will help better support work to document and conserve plant diversity for downstream use and suggest next steps for research and improvement of these data sets.

6 changes: 3 additions & 3 deletions 07-discussion.md
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Expand Up @@ -4,15 +4,15 @@ A decade after electronic publication was adopted by the botanical community wit

We anticipate further proposals for the revision of the nomenclatural code at the forthcoming nomenclatural section of the International Botanical Congress scheduled for 2024 in Madrid. These are likely to provoke discussion of access to botanical resources, eg including proposing the inclusion of photographs of type specimens [@renner_069_2021]. Meanwhile we outline below some specific recommendations for actions that could aid accessibility to resources, and for future research that could help further analyse the situation.

## Recommendations
Our recommendations are targetted as follows:

**Authors** publishing new taxa in books should encourage deposition of taxonomic data in repositories eg. descriptions in treatment bank [@agosti_possible_2022] or other suitable repository [@miralles_repositories_2020]. Authors producing large taxonomic revisions including type citation information should mobilise these as material citation datasets to GBIF.
If available, authors should include specimen catalogue numbers or persistent urls when citing specimens [@nelson_use_2018] and nomenclators should capture these identifiers for types to assist discovery and reuse of the specimen data.

**Nomenclators** have a potential role in promoting the understanding of open access amongst both authors and users of nomenclature. We recommend that flags are displayed alongside nomenclatural act records to indicate the OA status of the containing work. The publication record should also indicate if the title is present in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Prototype systems for names registration [@govaerts_new_2022] are being developed in preparation for the next International Botanical Congress (Madrid, 2024); these should facilitate the inclusion of code-recommended data items associated with nomenclatural acts - e.g. catalog numbers for digitised specimens (if available).

**Institutions** that maintain their own publication repositories should ensure that they are included in the sources searched by unpaywall (https://unpaywall.org/sources) and encourage staff to self-archive (deposit a freely available copy of the work online) using an institutional or subject-based publication repository where possible. Several herbaria are associated with the publication of botanical journals; these include many nomenclatural acts and the botanical community would benefit from a move to an OA publishing model to faciltate access.

**Nomenclators** have a potential role in promoting the understanding of open access amongst both authors and users of nomenclature. We recommend that flags are displayed alongside nomenclatural act records to indicate the OA status of the containing work. The publication record should also indicate if the title is present in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Prototype systems for names registration [@govaerts_new_2022] are being developed in preparation for the next International Botanical Congress (Madrid, 2024); these should facilitate the inclusion of code-recommended data items associated with nomenclatural acts - e.g. catalog numbers for digitised specimens (if available).

**Journals** which currently publish online but which do not assign DOIs to their content (categorised as undiscoverable in this analysis), should assign DOIs. There could be a role for collaborative projects like the Biodiversity Heritage Library (who are assigning DOIs to historic content through initiatives such as their RetroPIDS project) to also assign DOIs to more recent content which they display - eg articles in the title "Phytoneuron" which are archived in BHL. Eligible journals should register in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

**Publishers** could shorten the embargo period for articles with nomenclatural content, to allow broader dissemination through self-archiving. Publishers should also waive or lower publication costs for primary biodiversity data encouraging greater use of the data and facilitating downstream research including allowing new data to facilitate urgent conservation action.
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