title: The GBIF integrated publishing toolkit: facilitating the efficient publishing of biodiversity data on the internet.
abstract: The planet is experiencing an ongoing global biodiversity crisis. Measuring the magnitude and rate of change more effectively requires access to organized, easily discoverable, and digitally-formatted biodiversity data, both legacy and new, from across the globe. Assembling this coherent digital representation of biodiversity requires the integration of data that have historically been analog, dispersed, and heterogeneous. The Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) is a software package developed to support biodiversity dataset publication in a common format. The IPT's two primary functions are to 1) encode existing species occurrence datasets and checklists, such as records from natural history collections or observations, in the Darwin Core standard to enhance interoperability of data, and 2) publish and archive data and metadata for broad use in a Darwin Core Archive, a set of files following a standard format. Here we discuss the key need for the IPT, how it has developed in response to community input, and how it continues to evolve to streamline and enhance the interoperability, discoverability, and mobilization of new data types beyond basic Darwin Core records. We close with a discussion how IPT has impacted the biodiversity research community, how it enhances data publishing in more traditional journal venues, along with new features implemented in the latest version of the IPT, and future plans for more enhancements.
authors.affiliation: Global Biodiversity Information Facility, Copenhagen, Denmark.
authors.forename: Tim
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Robertson
authors.affiliation: Global Biodiversity Information Facility, Copenhagen, Denmark.
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Döring
authors.affiliation: University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, United States of America.
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Guralnick
authors.affiliation: University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States of America.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Bloom
authors.affiliation: University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States of America.
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wieczorek
authors.affiliation: Global Biodiversity Information Facility, Copenhagen, Denmark.
authors.forename: Kyle
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Braak
authors.affiliation: University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, United States of America.
authors.forename: Javier
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Otegui
authors.affiliation: University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, United States of America.
authors.forename: Laura
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Russell
authors.affiliation: Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO), Brussels, Belgium.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Desmet
mesh_terms: D044822:Biodiversity; D020407:Internet; D011643:Publishing; D012984:Software
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