GBIF has constituted a Task Group to provide recommendations on needs and potentials for bringing a cultural change towards free and open access to primary biodiversity data, through the establishment of a ‘Data Publishing Framework’ that addresses social, technical, and policy concerns on this topic.
Recommendations will include a practical mechanism to implement a system to incentivise individual and institutional efforts in data generation, management and dissemination following open access principles.
The Data Publishing Framework Task Group will be co-chaired by Dr. Tom Moritiz, Director, Public Programs, Internet Archive, USA and Dr. S. Krishnan, Head, Information Division, National Chemical Laboratory, India. Other members of the Task Group are:
- Dave Roberts, Natural History Museum, London, United Kingdom
- Donat Agosti, Plazi, Switzerland
- Peter Ingwarsen, Copenhagen University, Copenhagen, Denmark
- Philippa Benson, The Wildlife Society, United States of America
- Matthew Cockerill, BioMedCentral, United Kingdom
- Lyubomir Penev, ZooKeys, Bulgaria
The Data Publishing Framework Task Group will provide a report to the GBIF Secretariat on the following issues on or before 1 September 2009:
- Review of primary scientific data publishing/dissemination in various disciplines and comparison with the current state of ‘primary biodiversity data’ publishing/dissemination;
- Identification of social, technical and policy interventions that would encourage the publication of ‘primary biodiversity data’ as a necessary and in-built step within the scientific data management cycle;
- Recommendations on opportunities and mechanisms to incentivise and attribute credit for investment in primary data publishing, from individual to institutional to national levels;
- Conceptualisation of a ‘Data Publishing/Visualisation Factor’ together with technical implications of its implementation within the GBIF network.
Dr. Vishwas Chavan, Senior Programme Officer for DIGIT (Digitisation and Mobilisation of Primary Biodiversity Data), is the GBIF Secretariat point of contact for the Task Group (Email: vchavan_@If you can read this, please upgrade to a modern browser.gbif.org).
