Taxonomic treatment

Taxonomic treatment of Apis mellifera, Linnaeus 1758

A taxonomic treatment is a section in a scientific publication documenting the features of a related group of organisms or taxa.[1] Treatments have been the building blocks of how data about taxa are provided, ever since the beginning of modern taxonomy by Linnaeus 1753 for plants[2] and 1758 for animals.[3] Each scientifically described taxon has at least one taxonomic treatment. In today’s publishing, a taxonomic treatment tag[4]

is used to delimit such a section.[5] It allows to make this section findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable FAIR data. This is implemented in the Biodiversity Literature Repository, where upon deposition of the treatment a persistent DataCite digital object identifier (DOI) is minted. This includes metadata about the treatment, the source publication and other cited resources, such as figures cited in the treatment. This DOI allows a link from a taxonomic name usage to the respective scientific evidence provided by the author(s), both for human and machine consumption.

Treatments are considered data and thus copyright is not applicable[6] and thus can be made available even from closed access publications.

  1. ^ Catapano, Terry (2010). "TaxPub: An Extension of the NLM/NCBI Journal Publishing DTD for Taxonomic Descriptions". Proceedings of the Journal Article Tag Suite Conference 2010. 2010. doi:10.5281/zenodo.3484285.
  2. ^ Linnaeus, Carolus (1753). Species plantarum: exhibentes plantas rite cognitas, ad genera relatas, cum differentiis specificis, nominibus trivialibus, synonymis selectis, locis natalibus, secundum systema sexuale. Stockholm: Laurentis Salvius. doi:10.5281/zenodo.3931989.
  3. ^ Linnaeus, Carolus (1758). Systema Naturae per regna tria naturae: secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis. Stockholm: Laurentis Salvius. doi:10.5962/bhl.title.542.
  4. ^ Catapano, Terry (2010). "TaxPub: An Extension of the NLM/NCBI Journal Publishing DTD for Taxonomic Descriptions". Proceedings of the Journal Article Tag Suite Conference 2010. 2010. doi:10.5281/zenodo.3484285.
  5. ^ Penev, Lyubomir; Catapano, Terry; Agosti, Donat (2012). "Implementation of TaxPub, an NLM DTD extension for domain-specific markup in taxonomy, from the experience of a biodiversity publisher". Journal Article Tag Suite Conference (JATS-Con) Proceedings 2012. 2012. doi:10.5281/zenodo.804247.
  6. ^ Patterson, David J.; Egloff, Willi; Agosti, Donat; Eades, D; Franz, Niko; Hagedorn, Gregor; Rees, J.; Remsen, David P. (2012). "Scientific names of organisms: attribution, rights, and licensing". BMC Research Notes. 7 (79): 79. doi:10.1186/1756-0500-7-79. PMC 3922623. PMID 24495358.