Collaborative Research: Conference: Supporting inclusive and sustainable research infrastructure for systematics (SISRIS) by connecting scientists and their specimens.

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This project will create a conference-based workshop and symposium at the annual Association for Southeastern Biologists conference (March 2023; Winston-Salem, North Carolina) and the Botany 2023 conference (July 2023; Boise, Idaho) to train scientists in new computational skills and practices that build inclusive and sustainable infrastructure for collections-based research. Recent advances in web-based software now make it possible for taxonomic experts to receive greater professional recognition and citation of their digitized biological specimens and identifications. Use of these software tools can increase the visibility of scientists as well as modernize the professional rewards system to support the development of taxonomic expertise. However, creating a self-sustaining cycle of specimen attribution and citation that leverages this new software requires greater awareness by collections-based researchers and cultural change in how taxonomic expertise is credited. At the heart of this change is ensuring that the names of the people who collect and identify biological research specimens are disambiguated and associated with globally unique identifiers. Accurate people-data are an essential part of the vision for an extended specimen network because they link groups of specimens across institutions and uncover events in the history of science. The project will develop research infrastructure that is more inclusive, because taxonomic contributions by all people would be acknowledged explicitly, and sustainable, because improved recognition of taxonomic expertise would help build and sustain this scientific workforce in the US.Workshops will include 75 participants and the symposia will feature 12 diverse speakers, who will reach an anticipated audience of 190 collections-based researchers. Speakers will deliver case-studies that illustrate integrating people-data into the digital infrastructure of biological research collections. The workshop will comprise four hours of instruction about the use of globally unique identifiers for people within the biodiversity informatics open-access software services of Bionomia and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and their interaction with Open Researcher and Contributor ID, Wikidata, and Zenodo. Participants will learn how to use these tools as part of documenting their own collections-based research activities and as a means of community-level change in how taxonomic expertise is acknowledged. For the latter objective, participants will practice attributing US herbarium specimens to historical people from underrepresented groups, which will increase the visibility of these scientists’ intellectual contributions to biological research collections as well as improve the curation of digitized US biological research collections. Extensive plans are included to ensure broad participation, including outreach methods to underrepresented groups and support to participants in the form of travel stipend and dependent-care assistance. Workshop and symposium outcomes will be assessed rigorously and shared with the broader systematics community as a model for improving how taxonomic expertise is credited.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.