Taxonomic treatment refers to a section in a

scientific publication : ''For a broader class of literature, see Academic publishing.'' Scientific literature comprises scholarly publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences. Within an academic field, scienti ...

documenting the features of a related group of

organism In biology, an organism () is any living system that functions as an individual entity. All organisms are composed of cells (cell theory). Organisms are classified by taxonomy into groups such as multicellular animals, plants, and ...

s or

taxa In biology, a taxon (back-formation from ''taxonomy''; plural taxa) is a group of one or more populations of an organism or organisms seen by taxonomists to form a unit. Although neither is required, a taxon is usually known by a particular nam ...

. 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 and 1758 for animals. Each

scientifically described A species description is a formal description of a newly discovered species, usually in the form of a scientific paper. Its purpose is to give a clear description of a new species of organism and explain how it differs from species that have be ...

taxon has at least one taxonomic treatment. In today’s publishing, a taxonomic treatment tag is used to delimit such a section. It allows to make this section findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable

FAIR data FAIR data are data which meet principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR). The acronym and principles were defined in a March 2016 paper in the journal ''Scientific Data'' by a consortium of scientists and ...

. This is implemented in the

Biodiversity Literature Repository The Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR) is a biodiversity dedicated community created in November 11, 2013, in Zenodo, the open science repository at CERN and part of the European project OpenAIRE. The goal of BLR is to provide a long-term, s ...

, where upon deposition of the treatment a persistent

DataCite DataCite is an international not-for-profit organization which aims to improve ''data citation'' in order to: *establish easier access to research data on the Internet *increase acceptance of research data as legitimate, citable contributions to ...

digital object identifier A digital object identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier or handle used to uniquely identify various objects, standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). DOIs are an implementation of the Handle System; they a ...

(DOI) is minted. This includes

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

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 A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...

is not applicable and thus can be made available even from closed access publications.

Etymology

The term taxonomic treatment has been coined because the term description has two meanings in

species In biology, a species is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate s ...

or taxonomic descriptions. One is equivalent to treatment, the second as subsection in treatments describing the taxon, complementing diagnosis, materials examined, distribution, conservation and other subsections.

History

This term has been introduced during a national US NSF digital library project, and has been further developed into Taxpub, a taxonomy specific version of the

Journal Article Tag Suite The Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) is an XML format used to describe scientific literature published online. It is a technical standard developed by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and approved by the American National S ...

Plazi Plazi is a Swiss-based international non-profit association supporting and promoting the development of persistent and openly accessible digital bio-taxonomic literature. Plazi is cofounder of the Biodiversity Literature Repository and is maintain ...

National Center for Biotechnology Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is part of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is approved and funded by the government of the United States. The ...

, and

Pensoft Publishers Pensoft Publishers (also known as: Pensoft) are a publisher of scientific literature based in Sofia, Bulgaria. Pensoft was founded in 1992, by two academics: Lyubomir Penev and Sergei Golovatch. It has published over 1000 academic and professional ...

. It was prototyped by the taxonomic journal ''

ZooKeys ''ZooKeys'' is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering zoological taxonomy, phylogeny, and biogeography. It was established in 2008 and the editor-in-chief is Terry Erwin (Smithsonian Institution). It is published by Pensoft Publ ...

'', which adopted Taxpub from its volume 50 onwards, followed by

PhytoKeys ''PhytoKeys'' is a peer-reviewed, open-access online and print botanical journal. Its stated goal is "to support free exchange of ideas and information in systematic botany". Printed issues of the journal are available in the libraries of the Unit ...

. Taxpub is now used by journals published by

, European Journal of Taxonomy by

Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities The Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) is a taxonomic research network formed by scientific institutions in Europe. It was formed in December 1996 by ten of the largest European natural history museums and botanical gardens to b ...

(CETAF), and the

National Museum of Natural History, France The French National Museum of Natural History, known in French as the ' (abbreviation MNHN), is the national natural history museum of France and a ' of higher education part of Sorbonne Universities. The main museum, with four galleries, is loc ...

. The TreatmentBank service provided by

to convert taxonomic publications into

provides access to over 500,000 taxonomic treatments, including over 7,700 treatments for new described species in 2020. They will eventually become accessible in BLR after passing quality control to avoid artifacts due to the complex conversion of unstructured, mainly

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

based publications.

References

{{div col end Taxonomy (biology)