Abstract
GBIF - Gobal Biodiversity Information Facility - is an international network to enable free access of global biodiversity data via Internet. GBIF Sweden, placed at the Swedish Museum of Natural history (NRM), is the national node for Sweden and works to gather data from Swedish natural history collection and observation databases. These data are accessible through www.gbif.se and the global portal data.gbif.org. The Swedish research council (VR) is the main funding source of GBIF Sweden, and a new 5-years contract was recently established between VR and NRM. There are five positions within the project, of which one is for database support. The funding of this position ends in January 2008. During the establishment of the new contract, it became clear that VR will not raise funds for this position, and there is a risk that the position will be retracted. Because biodiversity databases have been established for various purposes, they are structured in various ways. Data providers need support to be able to deliver data according to standardised protocols. Since a support person was employed August 2006, the number of Swedish data records delivered has more than doubled. This shows the importance of this position for the work of publishing data on Internet. We point at the immediate need of funding of the database-support position and refer to previous contacts between GBIF Sweden and Formas, when Formas showed interest in contributing to the funding of the project.
Sweden