Virtual Biodiversity Research and Access Network for Taxonomy (ViBRANT, http://vbrant.eu) is an European Union FP7 funded project, now drawing to a close, whose goal is to facilitate the mobilisation, sharing, reuse and publication of biodiversity data.

The ViBRANT project developed some products and created others. and the basic mechanism chosen to achieve the goal of integration was to consider the end-to-end workflow in the generation of biodiversity data. The central system we use is Scratchpads (http://scratchpads.eu), which provide a social network and a primary user interface. Project success criteria were based on numbers of users. Scratchpads themselves have enjoyed logarithmic growth during the project, supporting over 540 sites and 6500 registered users. On-line publication (with Pensoft, http://biodiversitydatajournal.com) of Scratchpad content has generated enormous interest with manuscripts being submitted well in advance of the journal’s actual launch (September 2013). The Citizens' Network for the Observation of Marine Biodiversity (COMBER) (http://www.comber.hcmr.gr), GBIF’s Nodes Portal Toolkit (NPK) (http://www.gbif.org/participation/participant-nodes/nodes-portal-toolkit) and GeoCAT (http://geocat.kew.org), which performs rapid geospatial analysis to facilitate the process of Red Listing taxa, have proved popular, attracting a significant numbers of users.

New services, however, take significantly longer to attract an active user base. RefBank, a bibliography of life, has been established and has grown to over 210,000 references available from several mirror server sites, e.g. at http://vbrant.ipd.uka.de/RefBank/search, or using the system API, documented in the RefBank download (https://git.scratchpads.eu/v/refbank.git/tree). The Oxford Batch Operations Engine (OBOE, https://vibrant.oerc.ox.ac.uk/) is, as far as we are aware, a unique service that allows users to upload a data set, complete with parameters, for analysis (drop-and-compute) through a single API. This is a one-step operation, the process of uploading initiates the computational task. You would use this service for tasks that were too large or too time consuming for your local machine, or for which you do not have suitable software. Our experience is that few users understand the concept at a glance and uptake has been slower.

The area in which we have been least successful in attracting users is to the ‘ontology platform,’ several of which are running on the BioWikiFarm (http://biowikifarm.net) created in the ViBRANT project.

A major part of the ViBRANT project effort is dedicated to training and support services to the growing ViBRANT and Scratchpads community. We consider that user support is crucial to maintaining an active user base.

The most important lessons have been the balance between tangible product and solid foundation. We used an agile management style that has benefited us significantly in a changing landscape and we identified four crucial components to projects’ long-term sustainability (finance, confidence, marketing & agility).