Help Build EOL

The Encyclopedia of Life is an unprecedented global partnership between the scientific community and the general public. Our goal is to make freely available to anyone knowledge about all the world’s organisms. Anybody can register as an EOL member and add text, images, videos, comments or tags to EOL pages. Expert curators ensure quality of the core collection by authenticating materials submitted by diverse projects and individual contributors. Together we can make EOL the best, most comprehensive source for biodiversity information.

A couple of things to note:

  • We are committed to building an open access collection, with as few restrictions on re-use as possible. Therefore all information you share with EOL must also be shared with the rest of the world under a creative commons license that allows the creation of derivative works, at least for non-commercial purposes. See our Licensing Policy.
  • We are committed to clearly crediting the sources of the information we serve and urge our visitors to cite and visit the original sources.

Here are a number of different options how you can participate in the EOL project:

I want to share my knowledge about a group of organisms.

Any registered EOL member can simply add text to EOL taxon pages. Simply create a (free) account (e.g., by clicking on create an account at the top of any EOL page), then look for the Add New Content link at the bottom of the TABLE OF CONTENTS. Unless you are a registered EOL curator, new text will initially appear with a yellow background indicating that it is not yet part of the authoritative EOL collection. Curators will review your submission and will promote suitable content to trusted status.

I have images or videos I'd like to share.

EOL welcomes image and video contributions (sounds coming soon!) from the public. The easiest way to get your images up on EOL is through our Encyclopedia of Life Images group at the collaborative photo-sharing site Flickr. Basic Flickr accounts are free, and it’s easy to tag your images for EOL use. Be sure to read the Group Rules and select a creative commons license that's compatible with the EOL Licensing Policy. Also, the images you share through Flickr must be your own and NOT images you found elsewhere. Our harvesting program checks the group every couple of days, imports new photos and videos and updates records if any of the data (tags, descriptions, licenses) have changed. Also, we recently started harvesting organism images from Wikimedia Commons, so if you upload your photos to this collection they will get imported into EOL also. Initially, all materials imported from Flickr and Wikimedia Commons will be in unvetted status which means that they will be shown with a yellow background and the warning "Images in yellow are not reviewed." EOL curators will then review your images (video curation coming soon!) and move them to the authoritative collection if the organisms are correctly identified and the image is of sufficient quality.

I'd like to help improve EOL content.

If you are a professional scientist or experienced naturalist, you can sign up as an EOL curator for your group of organisms. Even if you are not a trained scientist, you can ask questions or provide opinions by adding comments to images or text sections. Curators, information providers, and EOL visitors will be able to see and respond to your comments, so this is a good way of pointing out problems or requesting additional information. Also adding tags to text and images will help you and other people to sort through the wealth of EOL information and find things more easily on the site.

I'm a professional scientist, and I would like to help curate EOL pages.

EOL is interested in contributions from everyone. Curators will identify the best quality contributions. We invite you to register as a curator and provide us with your professional credentials so we can evaluate your expertise. If you have already registered as an EOL user, you can update your profile to request curator privileges. Once you are confirmed as a curator, you will be able to review the EOL content for your group, approving suitable materials and rejecting incorrect, misleading, or other low quality information. Curators are given credit, as editors, on the taxon pages they curate. For for more information, contact us.

A draft of the Curator Network plan is now available (also available in Spanish and Catalan).

I have an online database I'd like to share.

Register as a content partner to begin the process of sharing your information through EOL. You don’t have to fill out everything in the registration forms, just start with the Partner and Contact information to express your interest, and we’ll take it from there. Also, note that you don't need to share all of your text or multimedia, but what you do share must bear one of our accepted licenses. We will work with you so that it will be easy for you to keep your data updated on EOL. For more detail, see the following documents:

I am part of a community of scientists who would like to assemble information about the organisms we work on.

We are currently beta testing our new Expert LifeDesks. LifeDesks will enable scientific communities to assemble text and multimedia in ways useful to you and to us. Modeled after, and compatible with, EDIT Scratchpads, you'll have your own customizable online environment to manage classifications, upload images and bibliographies, and assemble taxon pages. In addition, it is easy to export content from a LifeDesk to EOL or other systems. 
Visit the LifeDesks Home Page for more information.

See our exemplar pages for the kinds of information appropriate for species pages.

If you need help organizing your colleagues, consider submitting a workshop proposal to the Biodiversity Synthesis Center.

I'm already contributing information to another project, and I'd like to see this information integrated into EOL.

If you are contributing to a project that's not yet sharing content with EOL, please let us know, so we can invite the project organizers to become an EOL Content Partner.

I'm a scientist, and I would like to devote a considerable amount of my time to working on contributions for the Encyclopedia of Life.

In order to support targeted content development for particular groups of organisms, EOL has recently launched its Fellows Program. The program is oriented at postdoctoral students, graduate students and others who will contribute content from their own research and catalyze contributions from others in their scientific communities. See EOL Fellows for more information.

I'm a teacher or college faculty member and would like my students to contribute to the Encyclopedia of Life.

Please contact our Education and Outreach coordinator who may direct you to a partner project, such as Animal Diversity Web. Or, you may want to wait for our K-12 LifeDesks, which will begin to appear in late 2009.

I'm a student and I would like to contribute to the Encyclopedia of Life.

Adding text and images for your favorite organisms might be a good first step (see above). Talk to your teacher about class projects that might involve EOL. You can also add tags to our images and comment on the contents of the web site. Later you’ll be able to use LifeDesks to submit information, observations, and stories. Feel free to register and take part in discussions on our Forum.

I am a scientist who has compiled an authoritative classification that EOL should be using for a group of organisms.

We encourage you to submit your classification to the Catalogue of Life.

We now allow you to submit your classification or your own list of names and use this to navigate through the Encyclopedia of Life. Expert LifeDesks also contain tools to help you build your own classifications and share them with us.

As an EOL content partner, you can also share your names information with the Global Names Architecture.

I have a database of species information, but it is not yet online.

Contact us to begin the process of sharing your information through EOL.

I want to have an Encyclopedia of Life that focuses on the organisms in my part of the world and that presents information in my language.

Regional EOLs, a key feature of EOL’s global outreach, typically serve species pages for the flora and fauna from a specific geographic area, in languages used in the region. Regional EOLs can be initiated by organizations that have an established track record in planning, funding or conducting biodiversity research or documentation projects in the target region. They must also be capable of establishing ties with other institutions in the region so that they are a logical organizer for that region. The organizer is responsible for funding and implementing the regional EOL. Contact us for more information.

Encyclopedia of Life is in various stages of discussion and development with representatives of institutions wishing to establish regional EOLs in China, the Netherlands, Central America, the Arab Region and South Africa. If your region is not yet represented in this list, consider initiating a regional EOL by contacting the organizations that would be most suitable for leading such an effort in your geographic area.