I can’t be the only one to notice that within the past year or so almost every observation now has some sort of copyright and aren’t getting picked up by GBIF. It used to be (as far as I can tell), that just about every observation was copyright free (aside from the photos potentially) and data sharing with GBIF was largely 1:1. Now it appears almost no observations are getting picked up by GBIF (at least in the taxa I study). Did something change with default settings or how the copyright information of observations was presented to observers? I spoke to one observer and they weren’t even aware their observations were being copyrighted and they said they weren’t aware of changing anything. This is seriously reducing the scientific utility of the site as the GBIF transfer was a huge factor for biologist use.
That’s very odd. I just checked a sample of my observations and the copyright hasn’t changed. I can see that this is a problem. In general, iNaturalist encourages (but does not require) open copyrights due to their arrangement with the organization that hosts their data.
Are you working with a small group of taxa with few observers, where one or two people changing would make a big difference?
I’m also wondering if maybe GBIF changed their policies or something.
Are you sure they’re not going to GBIF due to licensing? As opposed to some other issue, or just a delay in the processing?
This was an issue I looked into maybe a month or so ago and it looked like the answer was the copyright information of the observation itself. It looks like a lot more people are actively setting their observation copyright to proprietary levels and I wonder if this is due to using the app. I also wonder if most users know the consequences of setting their observations to these copyright statuses.
To answer sedgequeen’s question, I noticed this mostly with sponges.
I weirdly don’t think I’ve had any of my obs go to GBIF despite licensing all of mine as CC0/public domain, makes me wonder if there’s something going on at GBIF’s end too
Have they reached Research Grade?
Wait, your obersavation have to be CCO/CC-BY to be used for GBIF data?
GBIF takes CC0, CC-BY, and CC-BY-NC, but not other licenses.
@blue_celery are you able to share some example observations here or with help@inaturalist.org?
Yes, which is why I’m so confused.
There is a brief explanation of the different license types and which ones can be shared with which other websites (GBIF/Wikimedia) on your profile settings, under “content”.
I see your observations on GBIF: https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/4535916386, https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/4535642872, etc.
As an experiment, I looked at what percentage of iNat research grade observations for sponges were showing up on GBIF per year. My results were:
- 2019: 83%
- 2020: 80%
- 2021: 83%
- 2022: 86%
- 2023: 83%
So I’m not seeing the effect you are describing. Is there a particular group of sponges you’re noticing this in?
If you’re relying on GBIF badges on iNat observations, note that it can take over a month before that badge appears on the observation page on iNaturalist.
I don’t believe this has ever been the case. INat offers various Creative Commons licence choices but I’ve never seen any unlicensed obs.
I think you were referring to me when you mentioned “blue_celery”? Now that I’m looking for one I can’t find it lol. Of course. For a while there every sponge I looked at wasn’t being uploaded to GBIF. I don’t know. Maybe I just ran into a stretch of bad ones or something or maybe GBIF had a huge lag for some reason. For a while there, across multiple species and users, nothing was being uploaded to GBIF that I looked at. Even stuff that was months old. It doesn’t appear to be happening now. Weird. 
Well this is what I meant. I should be specific. I meant like actual “all rights reserved” Copyright (is there a word for this?) as opposed to CC copyrights. I saw a few observations like this, but I definitely can’t remember which ones. On a busy day I go through literally hundreds of observations.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I think most of the licenses for observations that weren’t showing up on GBIF were some sort of CC license. I guess I just assumed whatever copyrights they had were blocking their transfer. I’m not sure what was happening. Doesn’t appear to be now though.