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The present paper describes policies and guidelines for scholarly publishing of biodiversity and biodiversity-related data, elaborated and updated during the Framework Program 7 EU BON project, on the basis of an earlier version published on Pensoft's website in 2011. The document discusses some general concepts, including a definition of datasets, incentives to publish data and licenses for data publishing. Further, it defines and compares several routes for data publishing, namely as (1) supplementary files to research articles, which may be made available directly by the publisher, or (2) published in a specialized open data repository with a link to it from the research article, or (3) as a data paper, ie, a specific, stand-alone publication describing a particular dataset or a collection of datasets, or (4) integrated narrative and data publishing through online import/download of data into/from manuscripts, as provided by the Biodiversity Data Journal.