Pensoft have recently introduced “nanopubs”, small structured publications that can be thought of as containing the minimum possible statement that could be published. Nanopubs are promoted as FAIR, that is findable, accessible, interoperabile, and reusable. I like the idea of nanopubs, but the examples I have seen so far are problematic.

I stumbled across this intriguing paper: The authors are arguing that there is scope for a unit of publication between a full-blown journal article (often not machine readable, but readable) and the nanopublication (a single, machine readable statement, not intended for people to read), namely the Single Figure Publications (SFP): It seems to me that this is something that the Biodiversity Data Journal is potentially heading towards.

Below I sketch what I believe is a straightforward way GBIF could tackle the issue of annotating and cleaning its data. It continues a series of posts Annotating GBIF: some thoughts, Rethinking annotating biodiversity data, and More on annotating biodiversity data: beyond sticky notes and wikis on this topic. Let's simplify things a little and state that GBIF at present is essentially an aggregation of Darwin Core Archive files.