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ID for permanent and unique individual specimen from natural history museums for efficient and future-proof science

ID for permanent and unique individual specimen from natural history museums for efficient and future-proof science

NEWS - The wealth of data held in natural history collections can contribute to global challenges ranging from climate change to biodiversity loss to pandemics. However, current practices for collecting biodiversity and geological specimens are inefficient, limiting scientists.

But there is a serious lack of linkage between data centered around specimens and that from multiple databases, creating significant obstacles when researchers try to work with specimens from multiple collections.

Now, a publication is the first to demonstrate a new workflow to better digitize and secure biodiversity data in the future. The paper revises two genera of jumping spiders from two collections and describes the newly discovered species using a new workflow and format: digital specimen DOIs and nanopublications.

DOIs

Several initiatives have been launched in recent years to establish a globally accepted system of persistent identifiers (PIDs) that guarantee the “uniqueness” of a collection’s specimens, physical or digital, over time.

PIDs are markers, identifiers that point to a single object and distinguish it from any other object in the world. They’re acronyms like ISBN or ORCID. For digital research content, the most widely used PID is the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) proposed by the DOI Foundation.

A DOI is an alphanumeric code that looks like this: 10.prefix/sufix, if you type https://doi.org/10.15468/w6ubjx in your browser, you will open the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences mollusc collection database accessed through GBIF. This specific DOI will never point to anything else and will remain the same in the future, even if the database content changes.

DiSSCo and DOIs

The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) aims to provide DOIs for all individual digital specimens in European natural history collections. This is important, but DOIs for digital specimens provide a number of other revolutionary and very interesting advantages for DiSSCo and natural history collections in general. Among them.

Firstly, the use of DOIs allows linking digital specimens to all other relevant information about the same specimen that may be stored in other repositories (ecological data, genomic data, etc.). These expanded digital specimens link different types of data and the DOIs of digital specimens make a major contribution to inter-institutional scientific work. Scientists will be in a much better position to truly exchange and link data across institutions.

Second, digital specimen DOIs store additional metadata (name, catalog number, etc.) beyond the intended URL that allows access to some information about the specimen without having to retrieve the full data object. This metadata makes it easier for AI systems to quickly navigate billions of digital specimens and perform a variety of automated tasks.

Use of DOIs in publications

So far, the only DOIs that can be used in publications are DOIs at the dataset level, not at the individual specimen level. If a scientist publishes an article about a particular type of bivalve in a Belgian collection, the only DOI available to cite in the article is the DOI of the entire mollusc database containing hundreds or thousands of specimens, not the DOI of the particular specimen that might be the focus of the publication.

The publication in the Biodiversity Data Journal of the genera Chrysilla and Phintelloides was the first of its kind and opened the door to citing not only dataset-level objects but also individual specimens in publications using DOIs. There you can also comment, annotate specimens and much more, making science more dynamic and efficient than ever before.

Original research

Deeleman-Reinhold CL, Addink W, Miller JA (2024) The genera Chrysilla and Phintelloides revisited with the description of a new species (Araneae, Salticidae) using digital specimen DOIs and nanopublications. Biodiversity Data Journal 12: e129438, DOI:10.3897/BDJ.12.e129438

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