Plazi is a Swiss based international non-profit association supporting and promoting the development of persistent and openly accessible digital bio-taxonomic

Biological classification

Biological classification, or scientific classification in biology, is a method to group and categorize organisms by biological type, such as genus or species. Biological classification is part of scientific taxonomy....

 literature. Plazi is maintaining a digital taxonomic literature repository

Repository

Repository commonly refers to a location for storage, often for safety or preservation.Repository may also refer to:* Repository clone, concept from distributed revision control...

 to enable archiving of taxonomic treatments, enhances submitted taxonomic treatments by creating version in the XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

 formats TaxonX
and Taxpub, and educates about the importance of maintaining open access to scientific discourse and data. It is a contributor to the evolving e-taxonomy in the field of Biodiversity Informatics

Biodiversity Informatics

Biodiversity Informatics is the application of informatics techniques to biodiversity information for improved management, presentation, discovery, exploration and analysis...

.

The approach was originally developed in a binational National Science Foundation

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

 (NSF) and
German Research Foundation (DFG)

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft is an important German research funding organization and the largest such organization in Europe.-Function:...

 digital library program to the American Museum of Natural History

American Museum of Natural History

The American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...

 and the University of Karlsruhe, respectively, to create an XML schema modeling the content of bio-systematic literature. The TaxonX schema is applied to legacy publications using GoldenGATE, a semiautomatic editor. In its current state GoldenGATE is a complex mark up tool allowing community involvement in the process of rendering documents into semantically enhanced documents.

Plazi developed ways to make distribution records in published taxonomic literature accessible through a TAPIR service that is harvested by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)

Global Biodiversity Information Facility

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility is an international organisation that focuses on making scientific data on biodiversity available via the Internet using web services. The data are provided by many institutions from around the world; GBIF's information architecture makes these data...

. Similarly, the Species Page Model (SPM) transfer schema has been implemented to allow harvesting of treatments (the scientific descriptions of species and higher taxa) by third parties such as the Encyclopedia of Life

Encyclopedia of Life

The Encyclopedia of Life is a free, online collaborative encyclopedia intended to document all of the 1.9 million living species known to science. It is compiled from existing databases and from contributions by experts and non-experts throughout the world...

 (EOL). If available, the treatments are enhanced with links to external databases such as GenBank

GenBank

The GenBank sequence database is an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations. This database is produced and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information as part of the International Nucleotide Sequence...

, The Hymenoptera Name Server for scientific names or ZooBank

ZooBank

ZooBank is an open access website intended to be the official International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature registry of zoological nomenclature. It was officially proposed in 2005 by the executive secretary of ICZN...

, the registry of zoological names.

Plazi claims it adheres to copyright law and argues that taxonomic treatments do not qualify as literary and artistic work. Plazi claims that such works are therefore in the public domain

Public domain

Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...

and can be freely used and disseminated (with scientific practice requiring appropriate citation).