Electronic infrastructures accelerate biodiversity discoveries

Electronic infrastructures open new horizons for collaboration and acceleration of the research on world's biodiversity. International collaborative platforms, such as scratchpads.eu, yield opportunities, unknown before, to scientists to put together historical and newly collected data coming from different sources and working groups, says a special issue of the open access journal ZooKeys presenting the results of the EU-funded project ViBRANT.

ViBRANT stands for "Virtual Biodiversity Research and Access Network for Taxonomy" and is a European Union e-infrastructure project running December 2010 to 2013 that will support the development of virtual research communities involved in biodiversity science. ViBRANT combines the efforts of scientists from 17 European institutions to provide a more integrated and effective framework for those managing biodiversity data on the Web.

"ViBRANT is not only about e-infrastructures" commented the project coordinator Dr Vincent Smith from the Natural History Museum, London. "ViBRANT's core mission is to mobilize the treasures of biological data accumulated over centuries of scientific discoveries and to open them for collaboration to all who are keen to describe, record and safe the life on our Planet!"

ViBRANT's mission is clearly reflected by the collection of research and review articles published by the project partners but also by scientists from USA and Australia. The value of this book is re-inforced by the exemplar papers that demonstrate how innovations in e-infrastructures are implemented in real time and on real data.

The book focuses on opening and publishing of biodiversity data, a process that is largely promoted and supported by institutions, international organisations and governments because it allows the multiplication and intensification of efforts invested by the previous and contemporary generations of scientists.

Provided by Pensoft Publishers