Thanks for these perspectives and questions, @dshorthouse.
To be honest, we ourselves haven’t forgotten about it—we are very aware of the presence of staff information in GRSciColl. For now, though, GBIF has simply restored this pre-existing information from GRSciColl online. Data accuracy and curation is a topic for all aspects of the registry, not just staff information.
That’s why we are working, on the one hand, to establish proper links with sources like Index Herbariorum, and on the other, planning to explore how best to integrate systems like ORCID or, indeed, Wikidata (at least in part on the strength of this discussion).
In our recent announcement on GRSciColl, we asked members of the collections community who wished to edit, update and curate this data to contact us at scientific-collections@gbif.org. We will start work shortly with our first users outside the Secretariat, working through ‘teething’ issues and resolving them as we find them.
Our collective maintenance of this information, through any relevant channel, remains critically important in promoting collections as “first-class entities.” We hope to address many of these aspects in upcoming work related to the shared data-processing pipeline, and in collaboration with the TDWG Collection Descriptions IG, CETAF, DiSSCo, SYNTHESIS+ et al.
Lastly, since you bring up the four-letter word, three main points on GDPR:
- GDPR does not apply to the dead.
- GDPR does not mean ‘no names’.
- The legal advice we’ve received asserts that GBIF has what GDPR terms “legitimate interests” in providing information about identifiers and recorders in occurrence data in order to serve both the public interest and purposes of scientific and historical research.
In the coming weeks, we will engage the network’s data publishing community directly to ensure that our ongoing, collective efforts fully comply with transparency requirements under GDPR—even where we likely merit exemptions from it.