The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) calls for the contribution of non confidential information about the Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (PGRFA) to the Global Information System (GLIS) to facilitate access to such information by any party interested. The foundation of GLIS is the accurate identification of the PGRFA to which the information is associated. After extensive research and consultation, DOIs have been selected as the Permanent Unique Identifier of choice for GLIS. The webinar describes the challenges that the GLIS team of the ITPGRFA has faced as well as the benefits that the GLIS user community will receive by the adoption of DOIs.

1. www.fao.org/plant-treaty
Marco Marsella
Assigning
Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)
to Plant Genetic Resources

2. www.fao.org/plant-treaty
What is this webinar about?
• Some background
• The problem
• The solution
• The challenges
• The future

3. www.fao.org/plant-treaty
Background
• The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for
Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA)
• Promotes conservation and sustainable use of all plant
genetic resources for food and agriculture and the fair
and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of their
use
• Facilitates access to PGRFA as well as to associated
information
• Established in 2004
• 144 contracting parties

4. www.fao.org/plant-treaty
Article 17 of the Treaty
“The Contracting Parties shall cooperate to develop and
strengthen a global information system to facilitate the
exchange of information, based on existing information
systems, on scientific, technical and environmental
matters related to plant genetic resources for food and
agriculture…”

5. www.fao.org/plant-treaty
Multilateral System of Access and Benefit Sharing
• Access to the PGRFAs is facilitated
• Benefit arising from their use are equitably shared
• The Benefit Sharing Fund
• Monetary and non monetary benefits
• Access is regulated through the Standard Material Transfer
Agreement
• Third Party Beneficiary

6. www.fao.org/plant-treaty
The SMTA
• Also regulates the exchange of information associated to
the PGRFA
• Provider’s obligation:
All available passport data and, subject to applicable law, any
other associated available non-confidential descriptive information,
shall be made available with the Plant Genetic Resources for Food
and Agriculture provided
• Recipient’s obligation:
The Recipient shall make available to the Multilateral System,
through the information system provided for in Article 17 of the
Treaty, all non-confidential information that results from research
and development carried out on the Material
Information = benefit

7. www.fao.org/plant-treaty
What happens now
Provider
Recipient
B
B
A
A
A
A -> B

8. www.fao.org/plant-treaty
How GLIS and DOIs will help
Provider
Recipient
GLIS
DOI
1
A
A -> B
DOI
1
A
B
DOI
1
DOI
2
DOI 1
A
DOI 2
B

9. www.fao.org/plant-treaty
Provider 1
A
Recipient 1
B
Transfer
Recipient 2
A
Transfer
D
Provider 2
Recipient 3
C
Transfer
Recipient 5
I
Transfer
H
Cross
E
Recipient 4
Transfer
G Transfer
F
Selection

10. www.fao.org/plant-treaty
Assigning DOIs to PGRFAs
• What is the DOI associated to?
• Physical material, not its description
• Holder of the material
• Descriptors
• Based on Multi Crop Passport Descriptors with some extensions
• Mandatory: Holder, species, method, date, local identifier
• Recommended: Biological status, links to web resources, etc.
• Additional: Information on collecting, breeding, etc.
• Mapping our descriptors to DataCite metadata
• Several descriptors -> title
• Holder of the material -> contributor
• Acquisition or collection date -> date and dateType
• “PGRFA Material” -> resourceType
• Method -> relationType
• Holder’s location and collecting location -> geoLocationPoint

11. www.fao.org/plant-treaty
The Global Information System (GLIS)
• Facilitate access to information already available on the Web
• Identify PGRFA through Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)
• Store basic information on PGRFA to support discovery and
resolution
• Collect links to web systems where detailed information can
be found
• Promote standards and formats to facilitate interoperability
and data sharing among systems
• Promote “blessed” systems to facilitate participation
• Capacity building and data quality improvement
• Strengthening community ties

12. www.fao.org/plant-treaty
Advanced services offered by GLIS
• Relationships among PGRFAs

13. www.fao.org/plant-treaty
Advanced services offered by GLIS
• HasMetadata expansion
• Allows access to full set of descriptors in XML from within the DOI System
• Descriptors in multiple formats (Content Negotiation)
• XML
• JSON
• JSON-LD
• Darwin Core-Archive
• brAPI
• EventData
• GLIS will automatically provide links to publications citing the current DOI

14. www.fao.org/plant-treaty
GLIS for the user community
• Free-of-charge DOI minting
• The cost is covered by the Treaty Secretariat
• The Treaty is Member of DataCite
• The GLIS user community is represented
• Support for GLIS users
• Advice on adoption of DOIs
• Integration Toolkit
• Published formats and protocols to interoperate with GLIS

15. www.fao.org/plant-treaty
How you can register DOIs using GLIS
• Web form
• For small collections or for ad-hoc updates
• Excel or tab-delimited batch files
• For medium size collections or as a stop-gap solution
• XML-based protocol
• For large collections and real-time integration

16. www.fao.org/plant-treaty
The future of GLIS
• Become the “Google of PGRFA”
• Links to information hosted by FAO and other partners
• Technology transfer
• Traditional knowledge
• Early warning and threat advisory
• Regulations
• Other initiatives (e.g. CBD)
• Participate in standard setting initiatives
• Interoperability and data exchange
• Access to distributed systems
• Collaboration with existing systems
• FAO and third party (WIEWS, Genesys)
• Promote selected systems for adoption (GRIN-Global, B4R)

17. www.fao.org/plant-treaty
To know more about GLIS and DOIs
• www.fao.org/plant-treaty
• Details on the Treaty
• Details on the Global Information System
• DOIs
• Descriptors
• Guidelines
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Selected documentation and links
• Technical documentation

18. www.fao.org/plant-treaty
Thank you!
pgrfa-treaty@fao.org
marco.marsella@fao.org