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talk · Thursday 24 September · 15:02–⁠15:14 · FORUM

Literature usage in IPBES - Past, Present and Future with Libroscope

Rainer M Krug · Planning the Libroscope: creating research ready biodiversity from scientific publications

Recording time 6:45:55–6:58:03Open on Vimeo ↗

Summaries and key moments are machine-produced. Check the recording for the speaker’s exact words.

The short versionOpen, scripted literature search via OpenAlex transformed IPBES practice, and the Libroscope could close remaining gaps by making paper contents and grey literature searchable.

Overview

What this was about

Rainer Krug, an ecologist and data user involved in IPBES, described how IPBES literature searching moved from tedious, non-reproducible Web of Science and Scopus web-interface searches to scripted, transparent OpenAlex API searches after IPBES adopted a data management policy in 2020. OpenAlex is open, free and downloadable, handles millions of works on a desktop and supports snowball citation searches, whereas a Web of Science licence for one assessment would have cost over a million. Remaining gaps are content inside papers, languages, shrinking abstract availability and grey literature, which the Libroscope could address through semantic extraction and ingestion on demand.

Why it matters. Transparency of evidence is essential for intergovernmental assessments approved by governments, and this shows how open infrastructure and content extraction serve that need.

Key ideas

In the room

  • IPBES assessments synthesise existing knowledge, so literature is central and must be fully transparent to governments.
  • Earlier web-interface searches in Web of Science and Scopus were tedious, error-prone and not reproducible.
  • The 2020 IPBES data management policy requires data management reports documenting source data, processing and code.
  • OpenAlex is open by design, free at typical use, offers API and Parquet snapshots; 4.5 million works handled on a desktop.
  • Web of Science licensing for the transformative change assessment would have cost more than a million.
  • Gaps: data inside papers, keyword searches limited by language, reduced abstract availability, and grey literature.
  • Proposed: search by content and facts, snowball searches over knowledge graphs, and ingestion on demand from OpenAlex into Biodiversity PMC.
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Notable moments

In their words

Transcript

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Programme abstract

Literature usage in IPBES - Past, Present and Future with Libroscope

Rainer M Krug

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) produces global assessments that rely heavily on scientific literature as a primary source of evidence. Over time, the literature search practices within IPBES have evolved considerably - from reliance on closed, proprietary databases such as Web of Science and Scopus, toward open infrastructure like OpenAlex combined with scripted, reproducible, and transparent search strategies.

This talk traces that evolution and reflects on what has been learned along the way. It examines the trade-offs between different database choices, the shift toward programmatic and auditable search workflows, and the persistent challenge that scientific publications - while rich in factual biodiversity data - remain written for human consumption and are rarely machine-actionable.

A further complication is the role of grey literature - reports, technical documents, government publications, and other non-peer-reviewed sources that contain an abundance of important information and knowledge, yet remain largely invisible to standard bibliographic infrastructure. Grey literature is at best inconsistently indexed, poorly structured, and often inaccessible at scale, making systematic discovery and extraction particularly difficult.

Looking forward, I discuss how the Libroscope vision addresses the machine-actionability gap: by systematically liberating, structuring, and connecting biodiversity knowledge from the published literature in FAIR-compliant, AI-ready formats. The IPBES experience provides a concrete use case illustrating both the current limitations and the transformative potential that a shared Libroscope instrument could deliver for evidence-based biodiversity policy.

Submitted to the conference programme before the talk, so the talk itself may differ.