Here is a hypothetical case: you are working on a morphological phylogenetic matrix with a team of investigators. Because MorphoBank is a web application, your team can work on exactly the same data at the same time. All collaborators can see contributions from members of the team, including images associated with homology statements, as soon as they are made. Since everyone is always using the most up-to-date data, e-mailing of files and reconciliation of file versions is completely unnecessary.

All project information is kept private to the team, protected by password, until the team chooses to make it public. In conjunction with a peer-reviewed scientific paper, you may need to allow reviewers to access your data. MorphoBank provides the ability to allow anonymous, password protected, reviewer access to your data.

When a paper is in press or published in a journal is often the time an investigator wishes to place online his morphological matrix (including labeled images of your homology statements), images, lists of specimens and taxa, etc. that you have assembled in a form that is easy for your readers to access. Morphological data collection increasingly requires visual documentation of homology, but journals cannot always publish all images that support the research in a project. MorphoBank provides tools to simplify the online publishing of data resources including:

Note that you do not need to be working with a matrix to use MorphoBank. Many investigators have other scientific reasons to store media online in association with an upcoming publication, with associated information such as the repository and specimen number. MorphoBank welcomes these contributions.