07-discussion.md

Discussion

A decade after electronic publication was adopted by the botanical community with the hope that it would make plant diversity information more openly and widely accessible, it is clear that despite initial uptake [@nicolson_impact_2017], it has still not made a real difference in the availability of this information in an open way. We show that $nomenclatural_act_undiscoverable_pc$% of the nomenclatural acts published between $year_min$ and $year_max$ are in literature that remains undiscoverable by electronic means (Figure @fig:fig2 (b)) and only $nomenclatural_act_open_pc$% are published in open access literature. "Undiscoverable" does not mean that this information is not available in electronic space, but the lack of identifiers means that searching for, retrieving and ultimately refinding such resources is time-consuming and can be costly. This may not seem a problem for individuals and institutions with access to computers and server time, but for those botanists working in institutions where internet access and computing facilities are limited or expensive, or who use mobile data for searches, this is a significant barrier.

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, such as proposing the inclusion of photographs of type specimens [@renner_069_2021] or recommending type deposition in countries of origin [@mosyakin_091092_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.

Our recommendations are targetted as follows, starting with the communities whose actions we as botanists can best influence:

Authors publishing new taxa in books should encourage deposition of taxonomic data in repositories, e.g. descriptions in treatment bank [@agosti_possible_2022] or another 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.

Institutions that maintain their own publication repositories should ensure that they are included in the sources searched by unpaywall (see 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 institutions with 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 facilitate 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 at article level. 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 - e.g. 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.

Funders and the botanical community should facilitate wider mobilisation of specimen data to promote research, by increasing digitisation of herbaria particularly in South America, Africa and South Asia [@nelson_history_2019; @hedrick_digitization_2020]

Future research work

We propose future work on better understanding participant's ability to use Open Access, by examining information that can be derived from authors and places of publication such as affiliations, career stage seniority, collaboration makeup and roles (e.g. as collectors of specimen material from the field, identifiers of material in institutional collections and authors of published taxonomic work).