"“Countless variations of a reference to GBIF—often the GBIF portal—with one single thing in common: Not one of them acknowledges the data publishers whose work their papers rely on.”
This makes good sense when you realise the data that users rely on is not, in fact, the data as provided by the data publishers. It’s instead the data as modified by GBIF in processing. The differences between provided data and processed data can be substantial, especially with regard to taxonomic names.
"“It is a little surprising that GBIF asks users to cite their downloaded
data as authored by the provider (See Methods, Data sources), and that ALA
likewise asks (in each download’s citation.csv file) that data be cited as
records from the provider. Clearly this is not the case for processed data.
It would be more correct to say that aggregated data are made available as
the combined work of provider and aggregator, and that the aggregator is
solely responsible for any differences between original and processed data.”
(https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.751.24791; 2018 paper)
If you cite GBIF as the source of your data, you are only telling the truth. The alternative would be to say something like: “Occurrence data from GBIF, as modified from these original sources…”