The BNHS’s ENVIS team published the first-ever peer-reviewed paper derived directly from a biodiversity metadata document in ZooKeys, an international open-access journal, in November 2011 in collaboration with Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Denmark and WII, Dehradun, India. The paper entitled, “Literature based species occurrence data of birds of North-East India” was produced after the team, led by Sujit Narwade, Scientist, BNHS, described a dataset of bird observations in eleven Indian states between 1909 and 2008, centred on the Himalayan biodiversity hotspot, which were derived from references in scholarly literature, mainly the Journal of the BNHS. This dataset was compiled using GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) generating a manuscript that underwent a rigorous review process lasting nearly three months before being accepted for publication in ZooKeys. Lyubomir Penev, Managing Editor, ZooKeys, appreciated the team for being the first to bring out such a data paper from GBIF IPT and is hopeful that such data papers will provide incentives for those compiling data records about the occurrence of species to make their existence known to the scientific community, thus helping to increase knowledge about biodiversity and inform conservation measures. The paper can be downloaded from the following link