Challenges and obstacles to making open biodiversity data available in Uruguay

Abstract

The new challenges posed by global change require us to have quality data that will allow us to monitor biodiversity and stop its loss. At present, however, the Uruguayan state and its various ministries do not make primary data available. There is no open information available on specimens in national collections or cross-cutting institutional policies regarding access to data and scientific information financed with public funds. To begin to reverse this panorama, Biodiversidata, the Uruguay Biodiversity Data Consortium was created in 2018. Despite the progress achieved by this initiative (e.g., publishing the first open biodiversity data for the country), the number of digitized data in the country is the lowest in the region. Why are there so few open biodiversity data in Uruguay? The roundtable Biodiversity Open Data in Uruguay was developed to reflect on this issue. The main question to be addressed was: what are the difficulties or barriers in this country for open data? We focus on the following stages in the generation of open data: a) collection, and b) management and publication of the data. We found that the main obstacles in the first stages of the process are institutional obstacles to data collection (e.g., collection permits), the lack of support for biological collections in the country, and the absence of common standards for data collection. On the other hand, in the final stages of the data generation process, the main obstacles are the lack of knowledge about managing and publishing open data, the lack of a data-sharing culture, and the lack of incentives to do so. In this paper, we describe the obstacles identified and offer a series of proposals to overcome them.