ViBRANT First Year Review

I am delighted to be able to share with you the results of ViBRANT's first year review. This was written by three external reviewers (Barbara Aronson, Jessie Kennedy and Tom Dedeurwaerdere) after a day-long series of presentations from members of ViBRANT's management team at the end of January. I have cut and paste the executive summary below, but for those interested in the details click here for the full technical report and the EU's cover letter.

My sincere thanks to all the VIBRANT team who have worked so hard throughout the first-year of the project.

Best regards,

Vince Smith, Coordinator for ViBRANT

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

ViBRANT is a very important project which fits extremely well into the FP7 e-Infrastructure Capacities programme. The accomplishments of the project in the first year are outstanding and the project clearly attains the objectives of this period. In particular, we welcome the following general accomplishments in regard to the project’s general goal of making the data and information output of biodiversity science more integrated, accessible and accountable:

• The project has been able to pool together various disparate projects and initiatives related to data and information integration and dissemination, by channelling them through a common infrastructure covering often disjointed aspects such as visualization, legacy data capture and publications. This is also reflected in the excellent integration amongst the work packages;
• In addition to the project deliverables and the project website, the outreach and dissemination of the first years’ work have been greatly expanded by publication of the project results in a special issue of the open access peer reviewed journal ZooKeys, with 20 contributions on the various aspects of the project, including (commendably) a number of papers by authors from outside the project who are using ViBRANT technology (Vincent Smith and L. Penev (eds.), 2011. e- Infrastructures of data publishing in biodiversity science. ZooKeys Vol. 150 ;
• A clear sign of the early success of the project is the success of the ViBRANT ambassadors’ network initiated through WP3, which has been able to attract people from outside the project and from many disciplines beyond the projects’ initial scope.  

The quality of the project was also reflected in the reporting, which was consolidated in the First Year Project Review, and in the well-targeted allocation of the financial resources.