All posts tagged with open-access

Sixty-two million pages of scientific text, images, and metadata, representing 500 years of biodiversity data will be openly accessible via the Registry of Open Data on AWS

The BHL Technical Team is thrilled to announce that Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) datasets will be openly accessible on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, thanks to the AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program. Moving BHL data to the cloud allows researchers globally to explore and analyze over 500 years of biodiversity data, enhancing their ability to derive scientific insights from our shared past to inform future global environmental policy.

BHL data is now hosted on AWS, and comprises over 62 million pages of scientific text from the 15th to the 21st centuries. BHL’s vast collection represents an unparalleled biodiversity resource with enormous potential to be used for longitudinal studies and conservation efforts.

Ten years ago in June 2010, the Atlas of Living Australia and Museums Victoria signed an agreement with the Biodiversity Heritage Library – and BHL Australia was born.

BHL Australia’s mission is to make Australia’s biodiversity literature freely accessible and discoverable. Ten years ago, we started with a single contributing organisation, Museums Victoria, and a team of five incredibly dedicated volunteers. 

Over the past 10 years, BHL Australia has grown considerably. Our operation is still hosted by Museums Victoria (at the Melbourne Museum), but we now digitise literature (and ingest born-digital material) on behalf of 27 organisations across the country. 

We are now a truly national project, representing Australia’s state and territory museums, herbaria, royal societies and field naturalists clubs, as well as government agencies and natural history publishers. Together these organisations have contributed more than 350,000 pages from over 2,400 volumes.

BHL’s digital library provides free and open online access to over 250,000 volumes from the 15th-21st centuries on a wide range of biodiversity subjects. These collections offer great resources to support distance learning.

All of our content can be accessed online for free and in full through our digital library portal at biodiversitylibrary.org. No login, account, or membership is required. You can also freely download anything in our library in a variety of formats. Our FAQ provides information on how to search the library and download content.

In addition to our general collections, we’ve identified a selection of materials that may be of particular interest to educators and students. Explore these resources below.

Unpaywall finds (legally) open access versions of paywalled literature. Thanks to the work of Richard Orr, Unpaywall’s Lead Developer, BHL is now one of the sources indexed in Unpaywall’s database. As of this week, 43,000 journal articles on the BHL website are now discoverable via Unpaywall.

Robert Dale Kloppenburg is definitely a dedicated botanist. As of January 2018 – when he celebrated his 97th birthday – he has named 234 plant species, mainly in the flowering genus Hoya, which has been his focus for close to forty years since his retirement. Kloppenburg and the International Hoya Association, of which he is president, have made some generous contributions to the Biodiversity Heritage Library, with funding of the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project.

During the final quarter of 2017 (October to December), BHL received permission for 44 new in-copyright titles, many as part of the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project. Below are the titles added in the fourth quarter, in the order permission was secured. As of the writing of this post, only one has been uploaded; the link is provided. Look for the rest as they’re added to the collection; you can check the recent additions, or see all the permission titles available in BHL on the permissions page.