Life and Literature Speaker Presentations: Closing Remarks from Director Tom Garnett

What does Indra's Net, a metaphor from the Buddhist text Avatamsaka Sutra, have to do with the Biodiversity Heritage Library? Find out in BHL Director Tom Garnett's closing remarks from the Life and Literature Conference! Furthermore, get a brief glimpse of BHL from the director's perspective, including an estimate of the total amount of core biodiversity taxonomic literature scanned by BHL to-date (33% pre-1923 texts and 7% total), a vision of BHL for the future, and a rallying call to all those involved in biodiversity digitization, research, or simply those who have an interest in biodiversity at large, i.e. everyone. With such encouraging remarks for the future, how can we doubt that BHL will continue to be an ambitious project that will successfully meet the variant needs of a wide and dispersed user community?

Life and Literature Speaker Presentations: Abel Packer

Today we feature the presentation by Abel Packer, leader of the implementation of the BHL-SciELO project in Brazil.

Panel 2: Publishers, Aggregators, and Authors

Panelist: Abel Packer

Presentation Title: "SciELO: Scientific Electronic Library Online"

Mr. Packer's presentation described the SciELO project, which indexes and publishes 800+ peer-reviewed scientific journals, serving 1 million+ article downloads per day. It provides enhancements to journals by publishing them on the Web in national and thematic collections under the open access model, with access to full text also provided. The presentation discusses what has worked in the process of developing and implementing open access projects, what the problems are and why, and next steps for open access projects, with emphasis on which avenues will benefit the scholarly communications community.

Life and Literature Speaker Presentations: Catriona MacCallum

Meet Catriona MacCallum, senior editor of PLoS Biology and consulting editor of PLoS One. She is our third featured presenter from the Publishers, Aggregators and Authors panel.

Panel 2: Publishers, Aggregators, and Authors

Panelist: Catriona MacCallum

Presentation Title: "PLoS: Public Library of Science"

PLoS, or the Public Library of Science, is the world's largest not-for-profit open access publisher. One of their journals, PLoS One, practices innovations in the areas of editorial criteria and review. Her presentation outlines these innovations and some important considerations for assessing impact.

Life and Literature Speaker Presentations: Dr. Lyubo Penev

Meet Dr. Lyubo Penev, the establisher and developer of Pensoft, one of the leading academic publishers specializing in biodiversity science and natural history.

Panel 2: Publishers, Aggregators, and Authors

Panelist: Lyubo Penev

Presentation Title: "The Pensoft Journal System and XML-Based Workflow"

During his presentation, Dr. Penev highlighted the many innovations and challenges that have faced the Pensoft project since its debut. Pensoft claims a digital publishing platform, tools for automated extraction and dissemination of published content, tools for web crawling and linking of published content to external sources, and Zookeys, a revolutionary open-access journal, among its achievements. Dr. Penev also outlined three areas that he believes should be an important part of BHL's mission and future. These include:

• becoming a true archive of both historical and recently published biodiversity literature
• continued pursuit of Citebank
• a closer collaboration between Citebank, Mendeley, ViBRANT's Bibliography of Life, libraries and publishers for article-level metadata exchange, de-duplication, and reconciliation

Life and Literature Speaker Presentations: Jan Reichelt

A fan of Mendeley, perhaps? Well, if so, you're in luck, for today we feature the presentation from Mendeley co-founder Jan Reichelt, the first of our featured presenters from the Publishers, Aggregators, and Authors panel.

Panel 2: Publishers, Aggregators, and Authors

Panelist: Jan Reichelt

Presentation Title: "Mendeley Research Networks: Life and Literature Conference"

Jan Reichelt is the co-founder and president of Mendeley, the world's largest research collaboration platform, and the world's largest crowd-sourced research database with 100 million uploaded documents. The presentation describes Mendeley and outlines how the project helps scientists and researchers all over the world collaborate and gain access to millions of vital research papers. As Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, relates, "I strongly believe that Mendeley can change the face of science."

Life and Literature Speaker Presentations: Sandra Knapp

Wondering what other presenters had to say at the Research, Informatics, and the Public Record panel after seeing the last two by Elycia Wallis and Donat Agosti? Well then, you're in luck! Today we feature the presentation by Dr. Sandra Knapp!

Panel 1: Research, Informatics, and the Published Record
Panelist: Sandra Knapp
Presentation Title: "Research, Informatics, and the Published Record: Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Dr. Knapp, a specialist on the taxonomy of the nightshade family, Solanaceae, is the author of more than 150 peer-reviewed papers and several books. Her presentation discussed the functions of publication and the multitude of new resources available that allow scientists to link to literature, specimen images, taxonomic information, and species descriptions, thus taking scientific work to a whole new level. She also discussed some interesting statistics, such as the fact that most people still decide where to publish their work based on the reputation of the journal, not the availability, or lack thereof, of epub versions of those journals. She also discussed that many scientists today, with an overload of articles and information, cite articles within their own work for which they have only read the abstract.

Life and Literature Speaker Presentation: Janet Browne

Today we feature the final presentation from the Humanities panel at the Life and Literature conference. Take a look at Janet Browne's presentation, entitled "Illustrations as Substitute Specimens."

Panel 4: Building Collaborative Networks for Science and the Humanities through Scientific Literature

Panelist: Janet Browne

Presentation Title: "Illustrations as Substitute Specimens"

Janet Browne is Aramont professor of the History of Science at Harvard University where she teaches the history of biology. She has authored a two-volume biography of Charles Darwin and is currently working on a cultural history of the gorilla. Her presentation discussed how, particularly in the early days of natural history science, illustrations of specimens often served as the only representation of those species that the public and other scientists could reference. Indeed, one of the earliest drawings of a Mastodon skeleton portrayed the tusks as curving inwards rather than outwards, thus resulting in the belief that this was in fact how the animal looked in life.