The Disentis Roadmap: a decadal roadmap for liberating global biodiversity knowledge from scientific literature

A vast share of biodiversity knowledge remains inaccessible, embedded in traditional literature and fragmented electronic resources. This limits scientific progress, constrains evidence-based policy, and hinders full use of rapidly expanding digitised data from natural history collections, citizen science, monitoring programmes including eDNA, and environmental impact assessments. Although biodiversity information is inherently well-structured and suitable for training emerging AI systems, current bottlenecks hinder its integration into Large Language Models and other automated tools. Overcoming these barriers is both urgent and transformative.

The Disentis Roadmap—developed at a 2024 symposium in Disentis, Switzerland—provides a decadal strategy for liberating biodiversity knowledge from publications. Building on the 2014 Bouchout Declaration, the Roadmap reflects coordinated contributions from publishers, Plazi, the Biodiversity Literature Repository at Zenodo, TreatmentBank, GBIF, ChecklistBank, and Biodiversity PubMedCentral (SiBILS). Automated workflows have already demonstrated the feasibility of large-scale data mobilisation, converting 198 journals and releasing FAIR data from over 95,000 publications, including 760,000 taxonomic treatments, 630,000 figures, and 1.7 million material citations. Complementary efforts by the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Taxodros, and research groups further showcase the value of liberated literature for IPBES assessments, biotic-interaction mining, and global biodiversity inventories.

As of November 2025, the Roadmap has been endorsed by 107 signatories who commit to ambitious objectives: universal enforcement of FAIR data standards by major funders and publishers; fully machine-actionable biodiversity publications with non-copyrightable components deposited openly; AI-readiness of all biodiversity knowledge through well-curated, semantically structured data; and dedicated funding to sustain the infrastructures enabling these goals.

At the centre of the Roadmap is the concept of a Libroscope: a globally deployed workflow that enables seamless discovery and reuse of biodiversity knowledge currently trapped in text. Priority actions include developing empirical use-cases, defining standards for machine-actionable publications, linking literature to specimen infrastructures such as DiSSCo and iDigBio, building efficient and legally robust workflows, and establishing a global training programme to maximise the reusability of biodiversity research.

The presentation will summarise progress towards the Disentis Roadmap objectives, and explain how the community can actively participate in shaping its implementation.