Terminologies as a Neglected Part of Research Data: Making Supplementary Research Data Available through the GFBio Terminology Service

In many research projects, much more data are created than made publicly available. Keeping research data deliberately closed or publishing only selected subsections of the gathered data are unfortunately common practices in academia. Fortunately, such problems have been getting more and more attention in the past years. However, another issue that is still often overlooked concerns research data that are generated as part of a research project but that are generally not considered part of the primary research data. One example for such neglected research data are terminologies such as controlled vocabularies that are used to describe or classify primary research data. In this paper we will outline the process that is used by the Terminology Service of the German Federation for Biological Data (GFBio) to prepare and process terminologies so that they can be included in the GFBio Terminology Service where they are made available to researchers within and outside the original research project. We will also show how making such supplementary research data publicly available will benefit the researchers who share them as well as the scientific community as a whole.