Zoosystema is a fully refereed, international, electronic and diamond open access journal in zoological research devoted to the inventory and analysis of animal biodiversity, using museal reference collections. It is specialized in systematics and explores related fields such as comparative and functional morphology, phylogeny, biogeography, taxonomy and nomenclature, and original field observations.

It provides immediate free open access to its content in order to support and encourage a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Journal history

Zoosystema is the continuation of the Bulletin du Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, 4ème série, section A, Zoologie (1979-1996). From 2018, Zoosystema is published online only with a continuous flow of publication (fast-track).

Journal data

From its launch, Zoosystema has committed to ensuring the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR principles) of its data.

In 2017, the journal partnered with the Swiss-based organization Plazi to retroconvert the metadata of articles published in PDF format, along with the taxonomic treatments and material citations they contain, into XML Taxpub format. To ensure adequate granularity, the journal adopted a new standard for formatting the material (Chester et al. 2019). The articles, as well as the associated treatments, figures, and metadata, are deposited in the Biodiversity Literature Repository (Zenodo) to be disseminated across various relevant data infrastructures, such as GBIF and Catalogue of Life, and the shared ChecklistBank.

For legacy literature, this workflow may have limitations. Indeed, the retroconversion of an unstructured article, despite the use of quality control tools, may lead to slight discrepancies. GBIF has introduced a feedback mechanism for each material citation, allowing users to alert Plazi about erroneous conversions, which will be corrected in due course. Catalogue of Life users and editors regularly check the data quality of the taxonomic data from digitized literature and report issues to the Plazi team.

To prevent discrepancies and enrich articles, the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris (publisher of the journal) initiated the development of a new workflow based on the XML-first approach (MetoTaxa), in collaboration with Plazi and the University of Caen-Normandie. After years of conceptualization, development, and testing, the tool will be implemented in 2026.