The Ebbe Nielsen Challenge, GBIF's annual incentive competition, has opened the call with the aim of recognizing innovative tools, both new and existing, that leverage biodiversity data from the GBIF network to advance open science in support of research and policy. An expert jury will judge entries on their relevance, novelty and quality to select a pool of winners to share a prize pool of up to €20,000.
Between now and 14 August 2024, individuals and teams can prepare tools and techniques that improve the access, quality and usefulness of open biodiversity data by submitting them to this open-ended competition.
Entrants may submit tools and techniques for use in biodiversity-related research and decision-making that they develop or improve to respond to the Challenge. Entries may build new tools or extend the capabilities of existing ones with new features. Entrants can explore a suite of dozens of previous Challenge winners to inspire ideas, topics and approaches worth pursuing.
Entries should benefit multiple stakeholder groups, including data users, data holders and data managers. Entrants may also wish to review the current GBIF Communications Strategy to see how GBIF characterizes its audiences.
Winners will be announced in late September or early October 2024 at the 31st GBIF Governing Board meeting in Portugal.
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 suddenly just before it came into being.
Official rules: 2024 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge
Entry form: 2024 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge
The following summary of rules and requirements does not replace or supercede the official rules. Send questions or requests for clarifications to ENChallenge@gbif.org.
Submission deadline
- 14 August 2024, 2359 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 contracting directly with 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 and the following components, which will comprise the formal submission:
- 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 a repository or platform of their choosing—GitHub, Jupyter Notebook, Dryad, FigShare, Open Science Framework or other web platforms.
By encouraging the use of tools that they are already familiar with, entrants can focus squarely on key questions of what, how and why:
- What is the submission?
- How does it work?
- Why should it matter to specific GBIF communities of practice?
What should I create?
The Ebbe Nielsen Challenge is intentionally open-ended. Entrants have a wide remit to create and improve tools and techniques that advance in open science and improve the access, quality and usefulness 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.
It is expected that successful entries provide practical, pragmatic solutions for the GBIF network while advancing biodiversity informatics and biodiversity data management, particularly in alignment with the GBIF strategic framework.
Criteria
A panel of expert judges from relevant scientific, informatics and technology domains will evaluate submissions based on the following criteria:
- Applicability: Does the Submission have sufficient relevance and scope that the communities GBIF support can use or build it?
- Benefit for GBIF network: Is there an added value of the submission for GBIF and how important/what kind of added value is it (new data, new community, new tools, outreach, policy briefing, etc.)?
- Innovation/Novelty: How new/unique is the Submission's contribution? Are there similar developments on the market (may be less user friendly)? Has a significant portion of the Submission been developed specifically for the Challenge/is strongly related to the Challenge?
- Quality of implementation: Does the Submission work reliably, is the technical implementation well done are the tools and services well described?
- Openness and repeatability: Are the constituent elements of the Submission, like code and content, freely available and transparent? Are they appropriately licensed?