Towards realising Darwin’s dream: setting the trees free

Preprint
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The fact that all living organisms are related by common descent is one of the central principles of modern biology. Since the early 1990's the amount of data available to evolutionary biologists has exploded, and Elsevier’s journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, has become the largest single publisher of evolutionary trees (phylogenies). These trees and their supporting data potentially form a tremendous resource for biologists, with applications in genomics, evolutionary biology, biodiversity, and public health. However, most published trees are not available in any public database, but instead languish as images, "locked up" in the pages of journals. A long term solution to this problem is to invert the relationship between journal and database, such that the database is the primary repository, and the journal article becomes effectively a "report" on that data, albeit a report that is citable, and thus has the same status as a scientific article. This vision is some way off being achieved. However, publishers could greatly enhance the scientific value of their digital content by expanding article metadata to include taxonomic names, shared digital identifiers, geographical coordinates, and data structures such as evolutionary trees. This metadata doesn’t require making the full text available, but could substantially improve the findability of that text.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: