Specimen - material citation matching service training course

Plazi’s first online two day training course “Biodiversity and Digital Media: linking material citations in publications to specimens” organized by Julia Giora and Jonas Castro has successfully ended. The Training school happened online from the 27th to the 28th of February 2023. It is part of a series of training courses in which Plazi expects to teach interested parties how to use data preparation tools to become a data liberator. It was organized in collaborations with the Mobilise COST Action – Mobilising Data, Policies and Experts in Scientific Collections – providing the Training School (TS) “ This hands-on and interactive training initiative gave the opportunity to 20 participants, from 11 countries, and representing 14 institutions of natural history research to get informed and exercised on the accessibility and reuse of taxonomic data using digital platforms and repositories. The main theoretical topics addressed were the concept of findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable data (FAIR) and Plazi workflow, the repositories for taxonomic data, and an outlook on how to convert data from missing publications aiming a future of publishing according to FAIR data requirements. The practical activities were focused on the learning and use of the eBioDiv Matching Service, with participants linking specimens in Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) to materials citations extracted from scholarly publications and made available through Plazi’s TreatmentBank. The development of tools and learning module is co-funded through BiCIKL and Arcadia.