The hard-left billionaire George Soros and his heir apparent son Alex have championed, with donations, defunding the police movement, open borders and soft prosecutors.

In his first visit back to Utah since awarding Salt Lake City the 2034 Winter Games, the International Olympic Committee president sought to ease worries that the city could lose its second Olympics if organizers don't fulfill an agreement to play peacemaker between anti-doping authorities.

Researchers and the public can now have immediate access to data underlying discovery of new species of life on Earth, under a new streamlined system linking taxonomic research with open data publication.

The partnership paves the way for unlocking and preserving a wealth of 'small data' backing up research conclusions, which often become lost within a few years of an article's publication in an academic journal.

In the first example of the new collaboration in action, the Biodiversity Data Journal carries a peer-reviewed description of a new species of spider discovered during a field course in Borneo just one month ago. At the same time, the data showing location of the spider's occurrence in nature are automatically harvested by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), and richer data such as images and the species description are exported to the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL).

This contrasts with an average 'shelf life' of twenty-one years between field discovery of a new species and its formal description and naming, according to a recent study in Current Biology.

A group of scientists and students discovered the new species of spider during a field course in Borneo, supervised by Jeremy Miller and Menno Schilthuizen from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, based in Leiden, the Netherlands. The species was described and submitted online from the field to the Biodiversity Data Journal through a satellite internet connection, along with the underlying data . The manuscript was peer-reviewed and published within two weeks of submission. On the day of publication, GBIF and EOL have harvested and included the data in their respective platforms.

The new workflow established between GBIF, EOL and Pensoft Publishers' Biodiversity Data Journal, with the support of the Swiss NGO Plazi, automatically exports treatment and occurrence data into a Darwin Core Archive, a standard format used by GBIF and other networks to share data from many different sources. This means GBIF can extract these data on the day of the article's publication, making them immediately available to science and the public through its portal and web services, further enriching the biodiversity data already freely accessible through the GBIF network. Similarly, the information and multimedia resources become accessible via EOL's species pages.

One of the main purposes of the partnership is to ensure that such data remain accessible for future use in research. A recent study published in Current Biology found that 80 % of scientific data are lost in less than 10 years following their creation.

Donald Hobern, GBIF's Executive Secretary, commented: "A great volume of extremely important information about the world's species is effectively inaccessible, scattered across thousands of small datasets carefully curated by taxonomic researchers. I find it very exciting that this new workflow will help preserve these 'small data' and make them immediately available for re-use through our networks."

"Re-use of data published on paper or in PDF format is a huge challenge in all branches of science", said Prof. Lyubomir Penev, managing director of Pensoft and founder of the Biodiversity Data Journal. "This problem has been tackled firstly by our partners from Plazi who created a workflow to extract data from legacy literature and submit it to GBIF. The workflow currently launched by GBIF, EOL and the Biodiversity Data Journal radically shortens the way from publication of data to their sharing and re-use and makes the whole process cost efficient", added Prof. Penev.

The elaboration of the workflow from BDJ and Plazi to GBIF through Darwin Core Archive was supported by the EU-funded project EU BON (Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network, grant No 308454). The basic concept has been initially discussed and outlined in the course of the pro-iBiosphere project (Coordination and policy development in preparation for a European Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System, addressing Acquisition, Curation, Synthesis, Interoperability and Dissemination, grant No 312848).

Original source:

Miller J, Schilthuizen M, Burmester J, van der Graaf L, Merckx V, Jocqué M, Kessler P, Fayle T, Breeschoten T, Broeren R, Bouman R, Chua W, Feijen F, Fermont T, Groen K, Groen M, Kil N, de Laat H, Moerland M, Moncoquet C, Panjang E, Philip A, Roca-Eriksen R, Rooduijn B, van Santen M, Swakman V, Evans M, Evans L, Love K, Joscelyne S, Tober A, Wilson H, Ambu L, Goossens B (2014) Dispatch from the field: ecology of micro web-building spiders with description of a new species. Biodiversity Data Journal 2: e1076. DOI: 10.3897/BDJ.2.e1076

Data collection and analysis are at the core of modern research, and often take months or even years during which researchers remain uncredited for their contribution. A new plugin to a workflow previously developed by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and Pensoft, and tested with datasets shared through GBIF and DataONE, now makes it possible to convert metadata into a manuscript for scholarly publications, with a click of a button.

Pensoft has currently implemented the feature for biodiversity, ecological and environmental data. Such records are either published through GBIF or deposited at DataONE, from where the associated metadata can be converted directly into data paper manuscripts within the ARPHA Writing Tool, where the authors may edit and finalize it in collaboration with co-authors and peers and submit it to the Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ) with another click. Until now, the GBIF metadata have been exported into an RTF file. The new feature will be also part of future Pensoft projects, including the recently announced Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO) Journaland the forthcoming Ecology and Sustainability Data Journal.

The concept of the data paper was introduced in the early 2000's by the Ecological Society of America in order to solve issues of handling big data and to make the metadata and the corresponding datasets discoverable and citable. It was then brought to the attention of the biodiversity community in 2011 as a result of a joint GBIF and Pensoft project and later implemented in the routine publishing process in all Pensoft journals.

Since then, Pensoft has been working with GBIF, and subsequently DataONE to automate the process of converting metadata into a human-readable data paper format. The novel workflow means that with only a couple of clicks, publishers of datasets on either GBIF, DataONE or any other portal storing metadata in the same format, may submit a manuscript for peer-review and open access citable publication in BDJ.

The process is simple, yet it brings a lot of benefits. Publishing data does not only mean a citable publication and, thus, credit to the authors and the repository itself, but it also provides the option to improve your work and collect opinion though peer-review. BDJ also shortens the distance between "narrative (text)" and "data" publishing.

"Metadata descriptions (e.g., data about the data) are of primary importance for data dissemination, sharing and re-use, as they give essential information on content, scope, purpose, fitness for use, authorship, usage rights, etc. to any potential user. Authoring detailed metadata in repositories can seem a tedious process, however DataONE users will now benefit from direct export of already created metadata into data paper manuscripts and have even better exposure of their work through discoverability mechanisms and scholarly citations," commented Dr Amber Budden, DataONE Director for Community Engagement and Outreach

"It is great to reap the fruits of a process that started back in 2010. The automated streamlining of biodiversity data between repositories and publisher is an elegant feature that makes publishing a data paper an easy and rewarding process to crown scientists data collection efforts and ensure its use and re-use," added Prof. Lyubomir Penev, Managing Director of Pensoft.

More detailed information on how data authors could use the workflow can be found on the Pensoft blog.

References:

Chavan V, Penev L (2011) The data paper: a mechanism to incentivize data publishing in biodiversity science. BMC Bioinformatics. 12(Suppl 15):S2. DOI: 10.1186/1471-2105-12-S15-S2

The work has been partially supported by the EC-FP7 EU BON project (ENV 308454, Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network) and the ITN Horizon 2020 project BIG4(Biosystematics, informatics and genomics of the big 4 insect groups: training tomorrow's researchers and entrepreneurs), under Marie Sklodovska-Curie grant agreement No. 542241.

Substantial amount of documented occurrence records is awaiting publication stored in repositories and data indexing platforms, such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD Systems), or Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio). In order to streamline the authoring process, save taxonomists time, and provide a workflow for peer-review and quality checks, Pensoft has introduced an innovative feature that makes it possible to easily import occurrence records into a taxonomic manuscript.

Prior to this development, Pensoft's ARPHA Writing Tool (AWT) only used the "upload from Excel" approach for this workflow. Although this method significantly simplified the process of importing materials and is actively used by the authors, it still required one extra transposition step.

Now, we added a new even more user-friendly option. By simply specifying an identifier (ID) in the relevant box, the new import plugin allows for occurrence data, stored at GBIF, BOLD systems, or iDigBio, to be be directly inserted into the manuscript. It all happens in the user-friendly environment of the AWT, where the imported data can be then edited before submission to the Biodiversity Data Journal.

Not having to retype or copy/paste species occurrence records, the authors save a lot of efforts. Moreover, they automatically import them in a structured Darwin Core format, which can be easily downloaded from the article text into structured data by anyone who needs the data for reuse after publication.

Another important aspect of the workflow is that it will serve as a platform for peer-review, publication and curation of raw data, that is of unpublished individual data records coming from collections or observations stored at GBIF, BOLD and iDigBio.

The work has been partially supported by the EC-FP7 EU BON project (ENV 308454, Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network) and the ITN Horizon 2020 project BIG4(Biosystematics, informatics and genomics of the big 4 insect groups: training tomorrow's researchers and entrepreneurs), under Marie Sklodovska-Curie grant agreement No. 542241.

Edmaris Carazo, a blogger in San Juan, adjusts to life in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

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We take a look at the romantic tropes of modern love and how they’re changing. Do the old dreams of true love and happiness ever after fit our new lives and new identities?

Original Air Date: February 13, 2021

Guests: 

Logan Ury — Angelo Bautista — Jane Ward — Angela Chen — Bara Jichova Tyson

Interviews In This Hour: 

The New Coffee Date: COVID-19 Pushes The Dating World To Zoom — Are Straight People Okay? — Love Without Touch, Desire Without Sex — Learning To Believe In Monogamy 

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