Thanks to the common effort of the EVA4.0 project team and The Department of Forest Protection and Entomology, the CZU Faculty of Forestry and Wood Science became the second Czech organization to become a registered publishing institution on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Thus, the Czech university of Life Sciences Prague joined the (still small) club of Czech publishers on GBIF.
As Dr. Mally from the EVA4.0 team clarified, the registration in GBIF was necessary in order to publish an occurrence dataset that will accompany a currently reviewed manuscript. “One of the advantages is that a dataset published in GBIF is considered a separate publication, including quotable DOI, instead of just adding the data to the supplementary material of a manuscript”. Furthermore, by adding the data to the ever-growing GBIF database (with currently over 2.2 billion occurrence records of all kinds of organisms), the accessibility and visibility of data are significantly elevated, with a high chance that the data will be put to use by other scientists. For example, a dataset published in the 2021 by the EVA4.0 team accompanying a paper in the journal NeoBiota already has eight citations on GBIF.
What types of data can I publish?
GBIF publishes resource metadata, occurrence data, checklist data, and sampling-event data. More info on these types of data can be found here.
How can I publish my data on GBIF?
Publishing data on GBIF is done through the Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT), a free, open source software tool. Check out GBIF’s tutorial video or consult the IPT user manual.
GBIF requires data to be submitted (or at least mapped against) using the Darwin Core standard. Darwin Core (DwC) is a set of standardized reference terms that describe biodiversity data. The crucial advantage is that by mapping the data against the DwC terms, the data become searchable by remote users, which opens up a spectrum of possibilities for reuse and integration of the data into other datasets. To get familiar with the Darwin Core, see GBIF’s brief description, or find out more directly at the Darwin Core homepage.
Once familiar with IPT and data input format, users can visit the website and establish an account for the IPT. However, potential users need to be aware that this account is not the same as the one for GBIF.
Moreover, any Czech University of Life Sciences Prague researchers with questions regarding submission of data to GBIF can contact Dr. Frank Richard Mally at mally@fld.czu.cz for assistance.