Biodiversity Knowledge in the Digital Era: Free Access and Reuse of Scientific Data (Course)

El conocimiento de la biodiversidad en la era digital: libre acceso y reutilización de datos científicos

Presenter: Julia Giora, Juliana M. Wingert

One of the great challenges of science is to facilitate the construction and availability of knowledge. In the digital age, knowledge about biodiversity is found mainly in scientific publications, which can be uploaded to various repositories or databases. To provide information to these repositories, data must be transformed into machine-readable formats. Additionally, people need to be trained and equipped to access and use this data appropriately. Colombia is a country with great biodiversity and important research institutions that constantly produce scientific knowledge such as Universidad Nacional de Colombia (UNC), Universidad del Rosario, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Universidad La Salle, Universidad de Los Andes, Universidad Jorge Tadeo, and Instituto Humboldt.

Plazi will be in Bogotá in March/2025 teaching a course that targets graduate students from different areas of biological sciences from Universities and Research Institutions in Colombia, as well as researchers, professors and curators of scientific collections of the country. The course aims to teach users to learn how to liberate data included in scientific publications, including material citations, taxonomic treatments, figures, tables and make it widely accessible through GBIF (e.g. occurrences / material citations in Colombia), the Biodiversity Literature Repository or the BiodiversityPMC. The topics that will be developed are: Plazi’s workflow and the main repositories associated with it, tools currently available for releasing data from scientific publications, training for using the GGI program, certification of new users of Plazi data release tools, discussion about the different possibilities for data reuse that can be integrated into research activities carried out in the country.