Data licences and organization type of contributors to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility as of 19 January 2016

Data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility were extracted using R (version 3.2.0) on 9 July 2015 using the rgbif package (version 0.9.0) (Chamberlain, S., Ram, K., Barve, V. & Mcglinn, D. (2015) Package ‘rgbif’: Interface to the Global 'Biodiversity' Information Facility 'API' http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rgbif/rgbif.pdf). The ‘rights’ statements was extracted for all occurrence datasets with one or more observations. A total of 12,458  datasets were extracted, but only about 11% of the datasets have an explicit data-useage-rights statement at the dataset level. However, some datasets use the occurrence level ‘rights’ and ‘accessRights’ fields. To extract these data the rights information was obtained from the first record of each dataset where a rights statement was missing at the dataset level.

The datasets were categorized into 13 different types depending on the origin of the observations.

1. Biodiversity Information Facility or data centre
2. Botanical Garden or Herbarium
3. Citizen science
4. Commercial
5. Data publisher
6. Educational
7. Government
8. Museum
9. Network
10. Parks Authority or Nature Reserve
11. Research institution
12. Society
13. Foundations