ZooKeys 150: Three and a half years of innovative publishing and growth

On the 28th of November 2011, the open access journal ZooKeys published its 150th issue – an excellent occasion for the Editorial team to evaluate the journal’s development and its position among systematic biology journals worldwide. From the very beginning, ZooKeys was designed as an innovative journal aiming at developing new methods of publication and dissemination of taxonomy information, including publishing of atomized, semantically enhanced automated exports to global data aggregators, such as Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Plazi, Species-ID and others. Since its launch on the 4th of July 2008, the journal provided registration of all new taxa and authors in ZooBank on a mandatory basis and continues to include their Life Science Identifiers (LSID) in the published articles (Penev et al. 2008). Also since its first issue, ZooKeys made it a routine practice of supplying all new taxa to the Encyclopedia of Life through XML mark up. In the subsequent years, the journal joined GBIF and the Taxonomic Databases Working Group (TDWG) in the development of common data publishing standards and workflows. In 2009, ZooKeys initiated several pilot projects thereby setting foundations of semantic tagging of, and enhancements to, biodiversity articles using the TaxPub XML ZooKeys 150: 5–14 (2011)