Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) v 2.3.2, DOI assignment, and Dataset Licensing

Tuesday, 16 February 2016

The Canadensys team recently updated our Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT), our data repository software developed by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) to version 2.3.2, the latest and greatest released version. We are proud to have participated in the development of this new version, especially in the assignment of DOIs to datasets. This was an option we maintained behind-the-scenes for Canadensys data providers though agreement with DataCite and is now fully integrated in the IPT, controlled by data providers. The GBIF team have been diligently maintaining documentation about their IPT where this new DOI workflow is described in detail. The upgrade to our IPT brought a few other changes to how we index and present data and metadata on the Explorer.

Changes to IPT Metadata

The first thing you will notice with the IPT is that it is now cleaner in its presentation of metadata with an abstract, links to downloads, explicit versions, licensing, and recommended citation more prominently displayed. Changes to required licensing were brought about by GBIF through consultation with the biodiversity community. Datasets must now be explicitly licensed as one of:

• CC0, under which data are made available for any use without restriction or particular requirements on the part of users
• CC-BY, under which data are made available for any use provided that attribution is appropriately given for the sources of data used
• CC-BY-NC, under which data are made available for any use provided that attribution is appropriately given and provided the use is not for commercial purposes

Changes to Darwin Core

A second change is that a previously recognized Darwin Core term, rights has been effectively replaced and made more explicit with license. The expectation now is that this term be populated with a single link to a Creative Commons license or waiver. For the majority of Canadensys data providers, this new term should be populated with https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode, which maintains our declaration to the global biodiversity community that our data are free to use without restriction, commercial or otherwise. If you publish data with us, we updated your metadata and data mappings and re-published your data with these changes. Before your next re-upload of data to Canadensys, you should change the content of this field in your local database and rename the rights column to license.

Another change is that the IPT is now more strict in its recognition of valid content in the basisOfRecord Darwin Core term. Whereas before it was relaxed in what it accepted, content in each record for this term must now be a selection from one of FossilSpecimen, HumanObservation, LivingSpecimen, MachineObservation, MaterialSample, Occurrence, or PreservedSpecimen. Note the absence of spaces in those values. We noticed a number of datasets in our IPT that failed this new restriction so we have fixed their content and republished them. As with the new license term, please verify the content of the basisOfRecord term in your local databases or spreadsheets if you publish data with us.

Webinar Tutorial

We think these changes warrant a webinar tutorial. We are currently working with our friends at iDigBio to develop an agenda and determine a date. We will update this post as we make progress on this event. If you have any requests for this webinar, please use the comments below.