BioDATA: Biodiversity data mobilisation and data publication training in Eurasia

Abstract

BioDATA (Biodiversity Data for Internationalisation in Higher Education) is an international project to develop and deliver biodiversity data training for undergraduate and postgraduate students from Armenia, Belarus, Tajikistan, and Ukraine. By training early career (student) biodiversity scholars, we aim at turning the current academic and education biodiversity landscape into a more open-data-friendly one. Professional practitioners (researchers, museum curators, and collection managers involved in data publishing) from each country were also invited to join the project as assistant teachers (mentors). The project is developed by the Research School in Biosystematics - ForBio and the Norwegian GBIF-node, both at the Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo in collaboration with the Secretariat of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and partners from each of the target countries. The teaching material is based on the GBIF curriculum for data mobilization and all students will have the opportunity to gain the respective GBIF certification. All materials are made freely available for reuse and even in this very early phase of the project, we have already seen the first successful reuse of teaching materials among the project partners. The first BioDATA training event was organized in Minsk (Belarus) in February 2019 with the objective to train a minimum of four mentors from each target country. The mentor-trainees from this event will help us to teach the course to students in their home country together with teachers from the project team. BioDATA mentors will have the opportunity to gain GBIF certification as expert mentors which will open opportunities to contribute to future training events in the larger GBIF network. The BioDATA training events for the students will take place in Dushanbe (Tajikistan) in June 2019, in Minsk (Belarus) in November 2019, in Yerevan (Armenia) in April 2020, and in Kiev (Ukraine) in October 2020. Students from each country are invited to express their interest to participate by contacting their national project partner. We will close the project with a final symposium at the University of Oslo in March 2021. The project is funded by the Norwegian Agency for International Cooperation and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education (DIKU).