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Are you an open data champion? The 2018 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge will award up to €34,000 in prizes to the most innovative entries that rely on open biodiversity data or open-source tools from the GBIF network to advance open science.

Between 9 May and 5 September, individuals and teams can prepare tools and techniques that improve the access, usefulness and quality of open biodiversity data and submit them to this open-ended incentive competition. Challenge entries may choose to develop new applications, visualizations, methods, workflows or analyses, or build on and extend existing tools and features like:

• GBIF API
• Integrated Publishing Toolkit
• Data validator
• Relative species occurrence tool

Entries should benefit multiple stakeholder groups, among them researchers, policymakers, educators, students and citizen scientists, and an expert panel of jury will judge entries on their openness and repeatability, relevance and novelty. Winners will be announced on 17 October 2018 at the 25th GBIF Governing Board meeting in Kilkenny, Ireland.

The Challenge honours the memory of Dr Ebbe Schmidt Nielsen, an inspirational leader in the fields of biosystematics and biodiversity informatics and a principal founder of GBIF, who died unexpectedly just before it came into being.

Submission deadline

• 5 Sept 2018, 1600 Central European Summer Time | UTC +2

Eligibility

The Challenge is open to individuals, teams of individuals, companies and their employees, and governmental agencies and their employees.

The Challenge is not open to:

• Current staff members at the GBIF Secretariat
• Individuals currently under an external contract issued by the GBIF Secretariat
• Members of the GBIF Science Committee
• Heads of Delegation to GBIF

Submission requirements

Entrants must complete the entry form, which provides information about the entry, including:

• Submission name/title
• Team member(s) names and affiliations
• Abstract and rationale
• Operating instructions
• Link to visuals (prototype, demo, video, screenshots, slides, etc.)
• Link(s) to submission materials on any appropriate website or repository

The judges and GBIF Secretariat staff must be able to

• access and operate or review the submission at no cost
• operate it on readily available hardware (if the submission is a stand-alone application)
• repeat any processes or routines, if the submission is a script or other automated solution

Entrants can prepare and document their entries on any repository or platform they’re comfortable with—GitHub, Dryad, FigShare, Open Science Framework, Jupyter Notebook, or use their own website.

By encouraging entrants to use tools that they are already familiar and comfortable with, we hope that anyone interested in submitting can focus squarely on questions of what, why and how—

• what the submission is
• why it matters to the GBIF communities it is intended to serve
• how it works

What should I create?

The 2018 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge is deliberately open-ended, so entrants have a broad remit for creating tools and techniques that advance in open science and improve the access, utility or quality of GBIF-mediated data. Challenge submissions may be new applications, visualization methods, workflows or analyses, or they build on and extend existing tools and features.

Criteria

A panel of expert judges from relevant scientific, informatics and technology domains will evaluate submissions based on the following criteria:

• Openness and repeatability: Are the constituent elements of the submission, like code and content, freely available and transparent? Are they appropriately licensed?
• Applicability: Does the submission have sufficient relevance and scope that the communities GBIF support can use or build it?
• Novelty Has a significant portion of the submission been developed specifically for the challenge? Submissions based largely or entirely on previously published work are not deemed to be eligible entries.

Special thanks

The 2018 Challenge is funded in part with the financial support of the Swedish Research Council.

https://www.gbif.org/news/1GQURfK5jS4Iq4O06Y0EK4/2018-gbif-ebbe-nielsen-...