The first data paper based on a Portuguese biological collection shared via GBIF was recently published. The article by Miguel Monteiro and co-authors describes the Bird Collection of Angola hosted at The Intituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, which houses 1560 birds of 161 species and 361 subspecies, including specimens of endangered species such as the wattled crane (Grus carunculata) and the Gabela bush-shrike (Laniarius amboimensis). The article entitled The collection and database of Birds of Angola hosted at IICT (Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical), Lisboa, Portugal was published by the open access journal Zookeys and is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.387.6412.
The publication of data papers is an initiative strongly supported by GBIF as a way to promote good description databases by metadata, facilitate discovery and access to data, enable individuals and institutions to be properly credited for their work to create and curate biodiversity data, monitor the use of databases through citations. The preparation of a data item is facilitated by the use of Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) platform that is used for publishing data through GBIF.
The Pensoft, editor of ZooKeys and other magazines that also accept data papers (Biodiversity Data Journal, PhytoKeys, Micokeys, Nature Conservation, among others) developed in conjunction with GBIF a workflow based on the GBIF Metadada Profile and IPT. This process enable the creation of a document that simultaneously describes the dataset published by GBIF and can be submitted for peer-review in one of the editors’ journal. There are other journals that also publish data papers, such as Scientific Data, published by Nature, which selected GBIF as a repository for species occurrence data.