Preliminary statistics suggest that worldwide use of and interest in GBIF’s open-access infrastructure for biodiversity data grew considerably in 2014.
While thorough analysis will require more time, GBIF Secretariat’s ongoing monitoring of scientific research literature suggests 35% increase during 2014 in the use of biodiversity data accessed via GBIF’s open-access infrastructure. The provisional annual total now stands at 337 new peer-reviewed studies, with 88 of them appearing in November and December alone.
Web traffic has also seen significant annual gains, with more people visiting GBIF.org more often. 738,649 users from 236 countries, islands and territories logged more than 1.13 million sessions during 2014, the first full year of operation of the redesigned GBIF.org.
Compared with the previous year’s total for its predecessor sites, the new platform attracted 22% more visitors, who together made 33% more visits. These same visitors viewed more pages per session—4.03 in 2014 compared to 3.5 in 2013—and stayed slightly longer—3:14 in 2014, as opposed to 2:57 in 2013.
The full archive of publications that cite or use GBIF-mediated data is freely available, and users can follow or join the GBIF public library group. Highlights from the science literature are available in GBIF’s monthly information updates, the bimonthly GBits newsletter and the annual GBIF Science Review. Those interested in gaining access to Google Analytics reports for GBIF.org can request it via email at comms@gbif.org.
These preliminary results will appear in GBIF monthly information update later this month, with confirmed 2014 annual totals on both research use and traffic statistics to appear in the February update.