Ten Years and a Million Links: Building a global taxonomic library connecting persistent identifiers for names (LSIDs), publications (DOIs), and people (ORCIDs)

Abstract

One thing the field of biodiversity informatics has been very good at is creating databases. However, this success in creation has not been matched by equivalent success in creating deep links between records in those databases. Instead, we create an ever growing number of silos. An obvious route to “silo-breaking” is the shared use of the same persistent identifiers for the same entities across those databases. For example, we have minted millions of Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs) for taxonomic names (which can be resolved at lsid.io), and a growing number of taxonomic papers have Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), but we lack connections between these two identifiers. In this talk I describe work over the last decade to make these connections between LSIDs and DOIs across three large taxonomic databases: Index Fungorum, International Plant Names Index (IPNI), and the Index to Organism Names (ION) (Page 2023). Over a million names have been matched to DOIs or other persistent identifiers for taxonomic publications (Fig. 1 shows the coverage of publications for animal names). This represents approximately 36% of animal, plant or fungal names for which publication data is available. The mappings between LSIDs and publication persistent identifiers (PIDs) such as DOIs and Wikidata item identifiers, are made available through ChecklistBank (datasets 129659, 164203, 128415), and also archived in Zenodo. By combining these LSID and DOI links with Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCIDs) for taxonomists, we can potentially gain insight into who is doing taxonomic research, where they work, and how they are funded. Possible applications of this data are discussed, including a tool to discover the citation for a species name (Species Cite, Fig. 2), using DOI to ORCIDs to discover who is doing taxonomic research, and creating a linked data version of the Catalogue of Life.