A new open-access journal started mid September and it promises to fill a void in the current publication space. I have written about data release papers before and it seems the perfect outlet for such has just been created from the publishers that are responsible for ZooKeys (the open-access competitor of ZooTaxa):
Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ) is a community peer-reviewed, open-access, comprehensive online platform, designed to accelerate publishing, dissemination and sharing of biodiversity-related data of any kind. All structural elements of the articles – text, morphological descriptions, occurrences, data tables, etc. – will be treated and stored as DATA, in accordance with the Data Publishing Policies and Guidelines of Pensoft Publishers.
The journal will publish papers in biodiversity science containing taxonomic, floristic/faunistic, morphological, genomic, phylogenetic, ecological or environmental data on any taxon of any geological age from any part of the world with no lower or upper limit to manuscript size. For example:
- single taxon treatments and nomenclatural acts (e.g., new taxa, new taxon names, new synonyms, changes in taxonomic status, re-descriptions, etc.);
- data papers describing biodiversity-related databases, including ecological and environmental data;
- any kind of sampling report, local observations or occasional inventories;
- local or regional checklists and inventories;
- habitat-based checklists and inventories;
- ecological and biological observations of species and communities;
- any kind of identification keys, from conventional dichotomous to multi-access interactive online keys;
- descriptions of biodiversity-related software tools.