Biodiversity Information Science and Standards :
Conference Abstract
|
Corresponding author: Patricia Mergen (patricia.mergen@plantentuinmeise.be)
Received: 03 Aug 2022 | Published: 03 Aug 2022
© 2022 Patricia Mergen, Miguel Rey Mazon, Dale Robertson
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Mergen P, Rey Mazon M, Robertson D (2022) Biodiversity Informatics: A success story for the long-term financial sustainability of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) . Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 6: e91207. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.6.91207
|
The European Open Science Cloud's (EOSC) ambition to provide European researchers, innovators, companies, and citizens with a federated and open multi-disciplinary environment where they can publish, find and reuse data, tools and services for research, innovation, and educational purposes. To enable this, EOSC promotes the use of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable) principles. The EOSC Sustainability Working Group under the EOSC Secretariat published the FAIR Lady Report (
The EOSC Association was established in July 2020 as the legal entity to govern EOSC. The Association appointed several Advisory Groups to provide recommendations towards the implementation of EOSC, including two Task Forces on Long Term Data Preservation and on the Financial Sustainability for Sustaining EOSC. This presentation will focus on the Financial Sustainability Task Force. The Task Force formed three "Working Streams" following the recommendation of the FAIR Lady Report to tackle the EOSC Core, Exchange, and Data Federation in smaller groups.
Within the Data Federation Working Stream, the experts have identified many thematic data federations that have exisisted for quite some time, notably in environmental sciences, biodiversity, and social sciences. The case of Biodiversity Informatics is presented here as one of these sucess stories, retracing the history of major data federations such as GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), the CoL (Catalogue of Life), BHL (Biodiversity Hertiage Library) and how they managed to move from community-driven initiatitves to structurally funded research infrastructures supported by national and international governmental authorities with a long term perspective, leading to the establishment of infrastructures like the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) and LifeWatch.
This presentation will also address the essential contributions of associations like TDWG (Biodiversity Information Standards) and CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) to achieving long-term sustainability and on how to successfully obtain complementary funds from EU projects in Horizon 2020 and its successor, Horizon Europe, with programs such as Synthesis of Systematic Resources (SYNTHESYS), DiSSCo Prepare, Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCiKL), and Transforming European Taxonomy through Training, Research, and Innovations (TETTRIs), to name a few.
biodiversity information, FAIR principles, sustainability
Patricia Mergen
TDWG 2022
Flemish Open Science Board (FOSB)