Biodiversity literature as FAIR and AI-ready data by design (and how to get there)

What this was about

Chris Le Coquet argued that the next step is not liberating more literature but changing how it is published. Rather than creating PDFs that must later be mined, XML-first single-source workflows (e.g. MitoTaxa, annotated in JATS TaxPub via GoldenGate) capture structure, references, semantic markup and persistent identifiers during production. Shared standards provide a common grammar, PIDs make entities unambiguous, and together they make publications FAIR by design, part of the Libroscope network and genuinely AI-ready.

Why it matters. Stopping the creation of new PDF backlog would free liberation effort for legacy literature and give AI trustworthy, structured inputs.

In the room

• Publications are infrastructure through which knowledge is validated, connected and reused.
• Plazi has liberated more than one million treatments from legacy literature; the question is whether this should remain the way we publish.
• In XML-first workflows, machine-readable structure exists from the start and many outputs derive from one source.
• References become structured objects that can be matched and resolved, preserving relationships for knowledge graphs.
• Semantic markup turns material citations into explicit entities and relationships.
• Machine-readable is not interoperable: standards (JATS TaxPub, Darwin Core, ontologies) give a common grammar and PIDs give identity.
• AI readiness is a consequence of good semantic publishing; the challenge now is scale and community convergence.

Notable moments