June 2023

The team of the Scientific Collections service of the Doñana Biological Station (EBD) integrated into the ICTS-RBD, has participated in the second meeting of the NN-DiSSCo-ES infrastructure, within the INFRA20012 project (financed by the GII program of the CSIC), as well as in the Second General Assembly of the Node at the express wish of Rafael Zardoya, coordinator of the Node and director of the MNCN (National Museum of Natural Science). Both events took place on 30 of May, at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid.

Immersed in the transition phase since 2023 and until the next phase in 2025, in which it is expected to sign the ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium) constitution agreement and the launch of the service, we will work coordinated by the DiSSCo-ES Node. The working method and the assignment of priorities will be established to standardize the services to be offered, incorporating the ideas and initiatives proposed by each collection or institution, always based on the FAIR principles. An active search for new partners will be carried out  collections and institutions that may be interested and distributed throughout the Spanish territory that, being of interest to DiSSCo, have not yet become part of the organization.

Let us remember that DiSSCo-EU was born with the purpose of adapting and creating a new environment of opportunities and constant evolution for the European Collections of Natural History:

• Providing services to the end user, optimizing access to collections, their management and conservation.

• Accelerating the digitization of its collections by permanently linking the representations of digital specimens with their attributes through distributed digital resources, thus guaranteeing Open Science.

• Reducing the global carbon footprint with digital access.

• Improving efficiency in research on the discovery and conservation of biodiversity.

As the most relevant points at the organizational level we can highlight the following.

The presentation of the internal structure for advice, monitoring and evaluation of the different lines of work, made up of:

• A Scientific Advisory Committee in which we involve personnel from different areas, disciplines included within DiSSCo-ES.

• A Working Group, with an unlimited number of people who with transparency, commitment and coordination will work to achieve the proposed objectives.

• An ICT Technological Team to support and support the Node.

The objectives and work priorities:

• Review of Policies and Working Documents.

• Unify and standardize preservation regulations.

• Provide guidelines and workflows according to FAIRs principles.

• Work on the quantification of impacts through indicators (publications, notorious use cases, access to data sets on aggregating platforms, etc.…)

• Development of technical capacities at different levels.

Finally, the initiatives focused on transmission to the society the objetives which go through social networks (Twitter), classic marketing campaigns (information leaflet, Roll up) and a proposal for the creation of a website in which partners and interested parties will participate collaboratively, facilitating material and news of interest for scientific dissemination.