Plate VIIGet Involved
A Platform Built With Its Community
Foraminifera.org is not a closed research system. It is designed to grow through structured participation — rigorous enough to maintain scientific integrity, open enough to be genuinely useful.
⟢ Who It's For
Open to the Entire Research Ecosystem
Participation is structured to match the depth of expertise you bring. Casual users, active contributors, and institutional partners all have a defined role.
Researchers & Micropaleontologists
Active taxonomists and systematists who work with foram material and literature. Your morphological observations and curation judgements are the core data the platform is built on.
Students & Early-Career Scientists
Developing specialists who benefit from structured, open access to comparative material. Contributing observations builds a citable academic record under your ORCID.
Educators
Lecturers and course designers who need accurate, reusable teaching material. The Foram World educational layer (in development) is built with structured learning pathways in mind.
Institutions & Data Providers
Collections, natural history museums, and oceanographic institutions holding foram material or legacy databases. Integration via API/MCP enables systematic data sharing without loss of provenance.
⟢ Contribution Paths
Ways to Contribute
Contributions range from a single observation to a systematic dataset integration. Every channel is described below with its scope and how the input is handled.
Morphological observations & images
Contribute structured character-state observations and specimen images. Observations flow into the character matrix that powers Testaria's morphological search.
Flag taxonomic or vocabulary issues
Spot a misidentification, a synonym gap, or a vocabulary mismatch? The issue-reporting channel routes directly to the curation queue for expert review.
Contribute literature to Nomia
Add publications not yet in the Nomia corpus — particularly grey literature, older monographs, and non-English language sources that systematic searches tend to miss.
Use Testaria and send feedback
Run identifications using the Testaria System and report what the tool gets right and where it falls short. Structured feedback is the fastest path to improving the morphological filter.
Integrate via API / MCP
Institutions and tool builders can connect to the platform's data layer via REST API or the MCP server. Contact us to discuss integration scope and data-sharing terms.
⟢ Scientific Integrity
How Contributions Are Handled
Every external input passes through a staging and curation step before it touches the live catalog. A staged record is visible and auditable from the moment it is submitted, but it does not influence search results or identifications until a curator has reviewed it.
Community contributions never write taxonomy directly. Taxonomy flows only from WoRMS, keyed by AphiaID — the external authority for species names and synonymy. This separation protects scientific integrity while keeping the platform a genuine two-way hub rather than a static database.
Staging
Submitted records enter a staging queue. They are versioned and auditable but inactive until curated.
Expert curation
A domain curator reviews the record against existing data, the controlled vocabulary, and the source citation before promotion.
Attribution
Promoted records carry ORCID attribution for the contributor. The curation event is also logged — full traceability in both directions.
Taxonomy lock
Species names and synonymy are never editable by community input. They sync exclusively from WoRMS via AphiaID.
⟢ Open Access
Our Commitment to Openness
No institutional licences are required to access the data. No paywalls govern the identification tool. No proprietary formats lock in the outputs. The catalog is published under open-data terms, the codebase under an open-source licence, and contributors are credited by name and ORCID — not just in an acknowledgements section but at the record level, persistently.
The platform is Pre-MVP and the contribution portal is not yet live, but the architecture is designed around open participation from the ground up. Channels for structured contribution will open progressively as the data layer matures.