Targeted Data Publishing to Increase Quantity, Openness, and Accessibility of Critically Important Public Health Data

Data publishing can incentivise data sharing, but there are technical and financial barriers for many authors around the world in sharing the data, writing the papers, and covering the costs, leading to geographic gaps and bias. One research field of great importance to human health is vector-borne diseases, which are responsible for more than 17% of cases of infectious diseases. Sponsored data mobilization campaigns can improve data coverage, and GigaByte Journal has worked with GBIF and TDR to launch a “Vectors of human disease” series to boost research with important relevance to human health. With WHO sponsorship covering the already low costs of the novel XML-first publishing workflow, a helpdesk is up to provide assistance with data submission, and multilingual functionality and linking to regional preprint-servers such as AfricArxiv and SciELO preprints enable communication in native languages other than English. This effort has led to the release of newly digitized location data for more than 650,000 disease vector occurrence records across the Americas and Europe, with more than half of the submissions from Latin America. A second phase of this effort has extended the geographic and taxonomic reach further, with many new data submissions from Africa and Asia. Here, I will present the latest results of both phases of this targeted approach to sharing data along with lessons learned from data mobilisation approaches to help and inspire others to carry out similar efforts.