Plazi

What Plazi does

Plazi is a Swiss non-profit organization founded in Bern on March 13, 2008, dedicated to liberating taxonomic treatments and biodiversity data from scientific publications and making them FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). The organization operates as Plazi GmbH and maintains core infrastructure including TreatmentBank (a service that extracts, enhances, links, stores, and disseminates taxonomic treatments, figures, tables, and material citations from publications), the Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR) hosted on Zenodo at CERN with 650,000+ deposits, and supporting tools such as GoldenGATE (XML/PDF markup editor), Ocellus (image discovery), Synospecies (taxonomic name resolution), Zenodeo (Zenodo API), RefBank (bibliographic references), and the Plazi REST API.

Plazi serves three primary customer segments: scientific researchers and taxonomists who need access to existing treatments to verify new species discoveries, scientific publishers (notably Pensoft and the European Journal of Taxonomy) who integrate Plazi's workflow into journal publishing pipelines, and large research infrastructures (GBIF, Catalogue of Life, DiSSCo, Biodiversity Heritage Library) that aggregate Plazi's liberated data. The organization is embedded in the global biodiversity data stack: Plazi data accounts for approximately 48% of all datasets submitted to GBIF, and the BLR is the single largest community on Zenodo. As of 2023, Plazi had liberated over 1.2 million taxonomic treatments covering 839,593 distinct taxa, with 2.1 million material citations extracted from 90,600+ articles.

Plazi is funded primarily through grants from charitable and institutional sources, with over EUR 3 million raised cumulatively since founding, including a EUR 1.1 million grant from the Arcadia Fund in 2018 and ongoing support from European Commission Horizon programs and Swissuniversities. All data is published under CC0 Public Domain Dedication; there is no commercial pricing model. The organization operates with 11-50 employees and pursues a community-led go-to-market strategy, conducting global training courses and participating in biodiversity informatics conferences (TDWG, ELIXIR, Biohackathons). Recent strategic initiatives include the March 2025 launch of the Disentis Roadmap, a decadal plan signed by 22 organizations to embed machine-actionable data into taxonomic publishing.

Name

Plazi

Legal name

Plazi GmbH

Website

https://plazi.org

Company type

Private

Founded year

2008

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

11–50 employees

Short description

Plazi is a Swiss non-profit that liberates taxonomic treatments and biodiversity data from scientific publications, operating TreatmentBank and the Biodiversity Literature Repository to serve taxonomists, scientific publishers, and research infrastructures including GBIF.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Biodiversity Data Infrastructure

NAICS

Web Search Portals, Libraries, Archives, and Other Information Services (5192), Software Publishers (51321), Computer Systems Design and Related Services (54151)

SIC

Services-Computer Programming, Data Processing, Etc. (7370), Services-Prepackaged Software (7372), Services-Computer Processing & Data Preparation (7374)

akta.pro primary industry

Knowledge Management & Scientific Collaboration / Literature Intelligence (HLAGAJAN)

akta.pro secondary industries

Scientific Data Management & Data Platforms (SDMS/Data Lakehouse for R&D) (HLAGAJAC), Digital Archives, Libraries & Institutional Access Platforms (MPAJAMAJ)

Keywords

• Biodiversity data infrastructure
• Taxonomic data liberation
• FAIR scientific data
• Open access publishing
• Taxonomy digitization

Headquarters

HQ city

Bern

HQ country

Switzerland

HQ region

Europe

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Technology or R&D, Personnel, Infrastructure, Operations, Marketing or Sales

Revenue model

1. Grant Funding: Plazi operates as a non-profit organization funded primarily through grants from organizations such as the Arcadia Fund, European Commission (Horizon programs), Swissuniversities, and other research funding bodies.

Go-to-market motion2 records

Distribution channels5 records

Marketing channels6 records

Core offering

Plazi develops and operates infrastructure for liberating, enhancing, linking, storing, and disseminating taxonomic data from scientific publications as FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data. Its core offerings include TreatmentBank (primary data extraction and storage service), the Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR) on Zenodo/CERN (long-term archive), and GoldenGATE (desktop XML editor), along with supporting discovery tools like Ocellus, Synospecies, and Lit Search. All data is published under CC0 Public Domain Dedication, serving researchers, publishers, and research infrastructures globally.

Product overview

Plazi is a non-profit organization offering a comprehensive biodiversity data infrastructure focused on liberating taxonomic data from scientific publications. The core platform consists of TreatmentBank (primary data extraction and storage service), the Biodiversity Literature Repository/BLR (Zenodo-hosted long-term archive), and GoldenGATE (desktop/XML editing tools). Supporting products include Ocellus (image discovery), Literature Search Tool, Synospecies (taxonomic name discovery), RefBank (bibliographic references), and Zenodeo (Zenodo API). Plazi also develops schemas (TaxPub, TaxonX, Treatment Ontology) and provides visualization and statistics tools. Data is accessible via the Plazi API in multiple formats (HTML, XML, RDF, Darwin Core Archives). All data is published under CC0 Public Domain Dedication and is integrated with GBIF, Catalogue of Life, and other biodiversity research infrastructures.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Brands

• TreatmentBank: A service provided by Swiss Plazi GmbH to liberate data from scholarly publications, converting, enhancing, linking, storing, and disseminating it as FAIR data. Contains taxonomic treatments, treatment citations, figures, tables, material citations and bibliographic references.
• Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR)
• Ocellus
• Lit Search

Products and services

• TreatmentBank Primary service that liberates data from scholarly publications and converts, enhances, links, stores, and disseminates taxonomic treatments, material citations, figures, tables, and bibliographic references as FAIR data. Contains over 1.2 million treatments and 2.1 million material citations extracted from 90,600+ articles. Used by researchers, publishers, and research infrastructures.
• Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR) Research infrastructure hosted on Zenodo at CERN providing long-term virtual access to biodiversity data liberated from scientific literature. Includes over 650,000 deposits and serves as the single largest community in Zenodo. All data published under CC0 Public Domain Dedication. Used by researchers, publishers, and aggregators.
• GoldenGATE Document Editor Visual XML editor for marking up documents, designed to automate most markup with manual corrections reduced to specialized dialogs. Includes standard HTML version and Imagine (PDF-based) alpha version for digital born PDFs. Used by trained scientists contributing to TreatmentBank.
• Ocellus Image discovery and retrieval tool for Zenodo, providing a frontend to BLR community with taxonomic treatments in TreatmentBank and citations on RefBank. Supports image search by ecoregions, biomes, and realms. Used by researchers and the public.
• Literature Search Tool (Lit Search) Discovery and retrieval tool for taxonomic literature supporting search by author, year, journal name. Searches across BioSysLit, Batlit, Taxodros, and BHL-SIBiLS communities. Used by researchers to find biodiversity literature.
• Plazi API REST API providing HTTP GET access to TreatmentBank data including RSS feeds, ZIP archives of Darwin Core Archives, and multiple data formats (HTML, XML, TaxonX, RDF). Supports treatments, occurrences, descriptions, distributions, media, and references. Used by developers and data aggregators.
• Synospecies Discovery tool leveraging RDF data and SPARQL queries to explore synonymic history of taxonomic names and find currently accepted names. Used by taxonomists and researchers.
• RefBank Website for searching bibliographic references with no registration required. Serves as repository for references that can be converted into different styles and formats. Used by researchers and publishers.
• Zenodeo Nodejs-based API to CERN's Zenodo that queries, analyzes and aggregates results from Zenodo repositories via a single, unified interface. Powers Ocellus. Used by developers and data aggregators.

Quantifiable outcome

• 1,238,021 taxonomic treatments liberated and made accessible
• +3 more outcomes

Named customers2 records

Segments3 records

Ideal customer profiles3 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration7 records

AI capability8 records

Feature7 records

Partnerships

Twelve partnerships are on record, tiered minor and core.

• CODATA & SemanticClimateminorStrategic or Co-development Partner · 24 March 2026Contributed to CODATA India Hands-On Workshop on FAIR data liberation and extraction, bringing together researchers committed to open science.
• European Journal of Taxonomy (EJT)coreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 3 February 2025Collaborative portal hosted by GBIF allows researchers to explore taxonomic data directly through EJT's website. Plazi converted publications into 53,000+ treatment datasets accounting for 48% of all GBIF datasets.
• SANBI (South African National Biodiversity Institute)minorStrategic or Co-development Partner · 18 April 2023Conducted joint training course in Pretoria for South African scientists on using Plazi tools and TreatmentBank for taxonomic data liberation.
• Zenodo/CERNcoreStrategic or Co-development PartnerZenodo at CERN hosts the Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR), Plazi's long-term digital archive for taxonomic publications and annotations. This partnership ensures sustainable preservation of liberated biodiversity data.
• GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility)coreStrategic or Co-development PartnerPlazi provides daily uploads of treatment datasets to GBIF with persistent identifiers. GBIF is a major aggregator using Plazi data to link observations with research results from taxonomic literature.
• PensoftcoreTechnology or IntegrationPensoft is a major biodiversity publisher whose journals produce articles in TaxPub format that Plazi can automatically extract. They collaborate on the BiodiversityPMC and other initiatives.
• BiCIKL (Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library)coreStrategic or Co-development PartnerEU-funded project where Plazi provides services for Transnational Access, develops PDF publication conversion, and serves as access point for bidirectional linking to liberated data.
• BRIC-National Institute of Plant Genome Research, IndiaminorStrategic or Co-development PartnerHost institution for the CODATA workshop in New Delhi, India.
• SIBiLS (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics Literature Services)coreStrategic or Co-development PartnerCollaboration on BiodiversityPMC - combining publications from life sciences with biodiversity fields, enabling text mining of biodiversity literature.
• DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections)minorStrategic or Co-development PartnerEuropean research infrastructure providing digital access to physical specimens; works with Plazi data to link specimens with literature.
• Museum für Naturkunde BerlinminorStrategic or Co-development PartnerCollaboration with Rudolf Meier and Amrita Srivathsan from the Center for Biodiversity Discovery on the 'digitally native species' initiative.
• Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL)minorStrategic or Co-development PartnerPartnership to create workflow from existing literature to liberate digitally accessible data for reuse in GBIF.

Scale indicators11 records

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights6 records

Emerging players

• Pensoft Publishers: Open-access scientific publisher specializing in biodiversity and taxonomic journals; uses TaxPub (Plazi-developed) to enable automatic treatment extraction, making Pensoft both a critical publisher partner and a peer in advancing machine-readable biodiversity publishing.

Broad incumbents

• Zenodo (CERN): General-purpose open research data repository hosted by CERN; hosts Plazi's Biodiversity Literature Repository as its single largest community, sharing infrastructure and CC0 distribution norms across scientific domains.
• Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF): Intergovernmental network and data aggregator for biodiversity occurrence data; Plazi is a direct data supplier to GBIF and both share the mission of making biodiversity data openly accessible, though GBIF operates at a broader occurrence/specimen level while Plazi focuses on taxonomic literature.
• NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information): Major life-sciences bioinformatics data infrastructure whose NLM/NCBI Journal Publishing DTD is extended by Plazi's TaxPub; shares FAIR data principles at a much larger scale across biomedicine rather than biodiversity specifically.

Others

• CrossRef: Scholarly metadata infrastructure providing DOIs and citation linking; operates in the adjacent layer of scholarly publishing infrastructure where Plazi's TaxPub and persistent identifier work integrates.
• OpenAlex: Open scholarly metadata catalog indexing global academic publications; adjacent in mission of making scholarly knowledge machine-actionable but broader in scope, providing metadata that complements Plazi's deeper treatment-level extraction.

Direct peers

• Catalogue of Life: Comprehensive species checklist aggregator that consumes Plazi's taxonomic treatment data via ChecklistBank; both organizations serve as core biodiversity knowledge infrastructure with complementary but intersecting datasets.
• DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections): European research infrastructure for digital access to physical natural science specimens; operates alongside Plazi in linking specimens to literature and shares the FAIR biodiversity data agenda with overlapping EU funding sources.
• Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL): Consortium digitizing legacy biodiversity literature; operates as a partner in Plazi's workflow but also a peer in providing open access to biodiversity publications, with overlapping collections and shared funder relationships.
• iDigBio (Integrated Digitized Biocollections): US-based biodiversity informatics infrastructure digitizing specimen collections; serves similar research community and overlaps with Plazi in linking specimens, occurrences and taxonomic literature in machine-actionable form.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat6 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights6 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/plazi_ch
• GitHubgithub.com/plazi
• YouTubevimeo.com/plazi
• Instagraminstagram.com/plazi_species

Compliance1 record

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles1 record

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

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M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Plazi