New collection: Open Digital Curation of Collections-based Biodiversity Data

Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ) launches a new topical collection, titled "Beyond Digitization: Open Digital Curation of Collections-based Biodiversity Data”, aimed at exploring the Open Digital Curation. Guest editors of the collection are Mr. David Shorthouse (acting as an independent), Roderic Page, Andrea Thomer. The submission deadline for contributions is 1st December, 2026.

While the initial push for digitization brought collections online, the future lies in Open Digital Curation, a continuous, inclusive process across the whole biodiversity data lifecycle. With the rise of AI, this issue aims to illustrate how human and AI-assisted annotations can be made transparent, attributable, versioned, and reusable across biodiversity data.

With a primary focus on natural history data from museums and herbaria, this special issue serves as a bridge between institutional practice and open science infrastructure. Case studies, technical methods, and synthesis papers that address the practical challenges of modern curation are invited.

"In a landscape shaped by uncertainty in employment and service continuity, round-tripping of natural history data might help preserve institutional memory while welcoming expertise from outside traditional boundaries. It could be a pragmatic response to an aging population of taxonomists and collections data managers, by embedding attribution, reuse, and continuity into the data itself - so knowledge endures beyond individual careers or the frailties of technologies. We are also in the midst of a critical juncture where widespread use of artificial intelligence will influence our notions of trust and expertise. I am excited to see what our active community might have to share on these topics and to help guide us into a new frontier in biodiversity data management." commented Mr. Shorthouse.

"Annotations have been much talked about, and there have been pilots and demos, but few success stories. Is this because the problem is hard, because we haven’t identified the right audience, because there is no guarantee that data providers will make use of annotations, or some combination of these? I hope that this collection will address these issues, and be a step towards our dream of high-quality biodiversity data." added Dr. Page.

"Natural history collections management has always involved some degree of data curation, but our growing use on digital infrastructures in all aspects of scientific and curatorial lifecycles means that trustworthy data curation has never been more important. I look forward to contributions that highlight the many creative and innovative ways that natural history stewards care for and wrangle their data - and that highlight the importance of keeping humans-in-the-loop even as we leverage new technologies for digital collections management." said Dr. Thomer.

Key areas of interest include:

• Incorporation of persistent unique identifiers, genomic metadata, and image/specimen labeling.
• Methods for improving georeferencing accuracy and updating taxonomic determinations.
• Workflows that ensure AI-generated enhancements and community annotations flow back to source systems, such as institutional repositories and Collection Management Systems.

Important information

• Submission deadline: 1 December, 2026
• Manuscripts will be processed as per standard journal rates.

If you have any queries, contact the collection editors: Mr. David Shorthouse (davidpshorthouse@gmail.com) and Dr. Roderic Page (roderic.page@glasgow.ac.uk).

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