The European Journal of Taxonomy supports the principles of Open Science through Diamond Open Access publishing. In accordance with the FAIR principles, the journal also operates an XML conversion scheme to optimise the findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability of biodiversity data.

By using standardised formatting, taxonomic treatments and specimen data can be identified and extracted from an article using Extensible Markup Language (XML). Once converted into a machine-readable format, this data becomes interoperable with other biodiversity information on a worldwide scale.

EJT submits all extracted treatments, specimen citations and article metadata to the Plazi Treatment Bank and GBIF; figures, along with their captions, are uploaded to the Zenodo Biodiversity Literature Repository. These stable, free-to-use, international platforms collect, archive and index scientific data, assigning DOIs to sub-article elements and datasets while giving explicit credit to the original author and publication, which facilitates research and improves citations.

To achieve optimal results, we propose that authors who publish in EJT use certain formats and controlled vocabularies that will allow the rich data within their articles to be accurately harvested and efficiently disseminated. Detailed guidelines on how to conform can be found in the ‘Specimen Citations Formatting Guide’ (PDF to download).