Engaging the community in FAIR taxonomic data liberation: an overview of training resources at Plazi

Presenter: Julia Giora

Since 2008, swiss-based not-for-profit organization Plazi has been supporting and promoting the development of persistent and openly accessible digital taxonomic literature. To achieve this goal, Plazi makes use of in-house softwares for data mining and extraction from taxonomic publications, along with other partner institution tools and platforms, to liberate data on animals, plants, fungi, and more. In its mission to make taxonomic data FAIRly available to the community, Plazi has developed sets of training material and courses, which enables taxonomists, collection curators, students, technicians and others to participate in the process of taxonomic data liberation. The participation of several different members of the community is key as data requires deep curation, often very specific to a particular field. Most recently, Plazi led a virtual 2-day workshop as part of the MOBILISE ACTION in Europe, along with two 4-day in-person workshops in Brazil and South Africa. Participants are issued certificates which entitle them to extract data on their own, thus multiplying the output of FAIR data using Plazi’s workflow. Here, we present a summary of the current status of said training tools/material, the next steps in development, and how they can help more and more taxonomists, or enthusiasts, liberate data. See presentation