Building Global Biodiversity Knowledge Through Open Access Data Eurasia Review

"An open-access platform to enable the integration of European and Brazilian biodiversity research tools has been developed through an EU-funded programme. The EUBRAZILOPENBIO (EU-Brazil Open Data and Cloud Computing e-Infrastructure for Biodiversity) project, which was completed earlier this year, will help promote cross-border innovation and the sharing of best practice in a vitally important field of research. Indeed, one of the great challenges of the 21st century will be addressing biodiversity loss, which is already estimated to cost the EU around EUR 450 billion a year. This is one reason why Horizon2020, the EU’s new research funding programme, has stressed the importance of tackling biodiversity loss quickly and effectively. Tackling the complexity of biodiversity requires dealing with multiple multi-disciplinary datasets, from climatology to earth sciences. Much of this data is fragmented. This is why EUBRAZILOPENBIO has sought to develop a platform that will enable cross-border research, and support the needs of the biodiversity scientific community by reducing the time and costs needed to set up dedicated working environments and workflows. The project is very much in line with the Open Access Movement, which promotes the concept of openness for scientific research, and is aligned with the OpenAIRE initiative launched in 2010 to establish an infrastructure for EU-funded researchers to publish their work ..."