The multitude of legal requirements for working with biodiversity specimens is challenging and time consuming for researchers and biodiversity research institutions, including universities, museums, governmental and private institutions managing natural science collections (e.g., biobanks, preserved and living collections). This challenge significantly increased with the adoption of national laws and processes on access to genetic resources and benefit-sharing developed by provider countries in response to the Convention on Biological Diversity, Nagoya Protocol, and other concerns. Legal requirements often include a complex sequence of requests to different national authorities, response times and fees. However, obtaining the necessary documents is only the first step. Legal documentation must be managed for the full life-cycle of biodiversity specimens. 

In 2016, the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN) released a data standard and controlled vocabularies for permits and loans. From 2019 to 2023, GGBN led a SYNTHESYS+ project task group to review and expand them. The main outcomes are two typologies contributing to some of the core elements from the GGBN vocabularies for permits and loans. Other elements of the GGBN metadata are not addressed. The Biodiversity Permit/Contract Typology and the Typology of Legal/Contractual Terms for Biodiversity Specimens (see Schiller et al. 2024b) can serve as internationally standardised classification systems for managing permit and contract documents, and promote an internationally understandable exchange of information on terms within such documents. Their application should enable people from various backgrounds to quickly recognise what documents and legal conditions (i.e., permissions, prohibitions, restrictions, obligations) apply to a given biodiversity specimen. Details were presented at the 2024 SPNHC-TDWG joint conference (Suppl. material 1).

The Biodiversity Permit and Contract Typology classifies legal and contractual documents based on their purpose. It consists of seven document categories and 38 document types (Fig. 1). We realised that documents with similar purposes, issued by different countries, may contain different terms (Fig. 2), hence document types alone fail to give sufficient information on what is allowed.

Figure 1.

The Biodiversity Permit/Contract Typology for sorting legal documents. Colorised version of Table 3 in Schiller et al. 2024b, posted by @RIOJournal on X.com 15 January 2024. 

Figure 2.

Countries use the same or at least similar terms, but they do not necessarily place them in the same type of document.

Therefore, a second typology (Terms Typology), with a set of 87 catchphrases was created (Schiller et al. 2024a). These short phrases describe the essence of a specific term in a document, indicating what is allowed, required or forbidden. Both typologies are very flexible: users can choose whether they use only document categories, only document types, only catchphrases, or a mixture of them.

Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) was the first institution to implement the typologies in its collection management digital infrastructure, MCZbase (Fig. 3). It is linking legal and contractual documents to collection objects via transactions and categorizing them using the Permit and Contract Typology. This allows rapid assessments of their applicability to accessions and loan shipments. Permissions and Rights records also include text fields to allow the addition of information on use restrictions, negotiated benefits, and any benefits provided.

Figure 3.

The Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University operationalizing the typologies in MCZbase.

The Terms Typology will pave the way for the automation of collection transactions (i.e., machine-actionability) for swift decisions on a large scale. Rights management modules integrated into collections management systems or GGBN could automatically compute and arrive at decision proposals (Fig. 4). The need for repeatedly going through documents to understand stated policies and their practical consequences in the case at hand will become a situation of the past. Such automatically computed proposals can support collection staff in efficiently evaluating associated rights and drawing conclusions. The proposals will always require the review by collection staff, who carry the responsibility for the final decision and action. Our proof-of-concept exemplar developed for the future DiSSCo Loans module, employing the Open Digital Rights Language ontology, illustrates that the typology allows machine-actionability.

Figure 4.

General decision model for a single event, including our proposal to integrate conditions into the functional processes of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Provenance ontology.

Moving forward, one of our aims is to develop an internationally recognised standard within Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), based on the typologies and prepare it for ratification.

Access and Benefit Sharing, collection management system, Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), data governance, Nagoya Protocol, open digital rights language, Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN), Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG)

Edmund K. Schiller, Jutta Buschbom, Breda M. Zimkus

SPNHC-TDWG 2024