The data paper concept as an approach to mobilize biodiversity data represents an opportunity to help gather the vast amounts of unpublished data for Colombia and the Neotropics. Since June 2013,  the Colombian Biodiversity Information System (SiB Colombia), a national initiative that aims to provide and facilitate free and open access to biodiversity data, has begun to meet this challenge by establishing the data paper concept in their own social and technological infrastructure through funding from Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). As a result, SiB Colombia established a synergy with the indexed science journal Biota Colombiana.

Biota Colombiana is published by the Humboldt Institute in partnership with the Natural Science Institute of the National University (ICN), the Marine and Coastal Research Institute (Invemar), and the Missouri Botanical Garden. Originally created as a journal specializing in publishing taxonomic checklists, Biota Colombiana has recently expanded its thematic coverage to include original papers on neotropical taxonomy, systematics and biogeography, as well as unpublished research papers in botany, zoology, ecology, biology, limnology, fisheries, conservation, resource management and biodiversity use.

The data-publishing workflow is a set of steps managed by the SiB Colombia Team, in which datasets are published on behalf of their publishers. The publication of data through the SiB Colombia IPT (Integrated Publishing Toolkit) allows uploading, standardizing, publishing and recording the data in a few steps. Currently, the publishers are encouraged to choose the data paper publication optional step, due to its ease and intuitive process that results in scholarly recognition through Biota Colombiana.

Since implementation of data paper in SiB Colombia’s publication model, it has become very popular among the Colombian scientific community. This model has mobilized over 18 data papers, 6 of them published in a special issue in December 2013. The cooperation between SiB Colombia and Biota Colombiana provides a free and easy-to-use mechanism for the publication of biodiversity data and metadata, which can be used and accessed via their Data Portal and offers publishers a structured and intuitive workflow of publication that allows easy generation a data paper. This presentation describes the first implementation of data paper model in a Latin American journal, the challenges and perspectives after one year of implementation.