E-Specimina

The overall aim of E-Specimina is to support researchers engaging in and developing ORD practices with and for the research community using natural history collections and to assist these researchers in becoming Open Science leaders in their field(s).
E-Specimina will address a specific gap in knowledge with an innovative approach; so far most research projects on biodiversity that rely on comparative datasets of selected organisms do not implement protocols to integrate the data compiled for the different repositories and, hence, the challenges to publish that information conform to ORD principles is not fulfilled. We seek to address this gap in the Open Science agenda with a needs analysis that brings together and in exchange researchers from different disciplines as well as repository managers.

E-Specimina investigates the integrated and interlinked management of research data of various types derived from comparative organismal studies that are so far still largely maintained in separate repositories. The awareness of researchers of different research disciplines that deal with comparative organismal data for the integrated ORD agenda, with the support of workbench management tools, will greatly enhance the ORD agenda of Open Science. We like to address this project task with structured interviews with a broad selection of stakeholders, a workshop with researchers and repository managers for more intensively investigating the diversity of challenges for ORD management and publication, and finally, with a proof-of-concept online browser-based implementation that integrates existing data repositories.