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Record W7126020775 · doi:10.1093/biosci/biaf071

Measuring the quality of species list governance

2025· article· en· W7126020775 on OpenAlexaff
Stephen T. Garnett, Olaf Bánki, Saroj Kanta Barik, Alex J. Berryman, Patrice Bouchard, John S. Buckeridge, Les L. Christidis, María Marta Cigliano, Stijn Conix, Haylee Crawford-Weaver, Peter Paul van Dijk, Neil L Evenhuis, Craig Hilton‐Taylor, Donald Hobern, Claire Johnston, Ronell R. Klopper, Andreas Kroh, Marianne Le Roux, Thomas Pape, Richard L Pyle, Lauren Raz, Philip Thomas, L. Vandepitte, Nina Wambiji, Frank E. Zachos, Aaron Lien

Bibliographic record

VenueBioScience · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicSpecies Distribution and Climate Change
Canadian institutionsAgriculture and Agri-Food Canada
FundersAustralian Research CouncilLifeWatch – Niclas Öberg FoundationVlaamse regeringFonds De La Recherche Scientifique - FNRS
KeywordsRubricCorporate governanceQuality (philosophy)Taxonomy (biology)Set (abstract data type)Independence (probability theory)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Taxonomic lists are important tools for efficient communication about biodiversity. The processes by which they are created and maintained need to be robust, scientifically sound, and transparent. Articulating and scoring a set of governance quality indicators provides a way to assess the relative strengths of list management, gives list users a means to assess the quality of this process, augments the information available to list aggregators, and allows patterns to be measured over time and among forms of life. Based on published principles, we created 12 governance quality indicators which we tested on 16 lists spanning a range of taxonomic groups. Independence of taxonomy from nomenclature scored most strongly, but scores for local and regional involvement were lower. The governance quality indicators may eventually provide a rubric for assessing best practice species list governance but now need a period of further testing, review, and refinement before they are institutionalized.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.040
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.112
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.040
Threshold uncertainty score0.211

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0400.112
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0060.008
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0040.006
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.083
GPT teacher head0.291
Teacher spread0.208 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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