One of GBIF's goals is to provide up to date, comprehensive data on the distribution of species. Although GBIF's taxonomy and geographic scope is global, not all species are equal, in the sense that the need for information on some species is potentially much more pressing. An example are mosquitoes of the genus Aedes , such as the species A. aegypti and A. albopictus that spread the Zika virus.

Interest in archiving data and data publication is growing, as evidenced by projects such as Dryad, and earlier tools such as TreeBASE. But I can't help wondering whether this is a little misguided. I think the issues are granularity and reuse. Taking the second issue first, how much re-use do data sets get? I suspect the answer is "not much". I think there are two clear use cases, repeatability of a study, and benchmarks.

For the last two days I've been participating in a NESCent meeting on Dryad, a "repository of data underlying scientific publications, with an initial focus on evolutionary biology and related fields". The aim of Dryad is to provide a durable home for the kinds of data that don't get captured by existing databases such as GenBank and TreeBASE (for example, the Excel spreadsheets, Word files, and tarballs of data that, if they are lucky, make it