If your grant involves the generation of morphological data matrices and/or 2D or 3D images that you would like to deposit as part of your publication, then MorphoBank can work with you to add text and budget to your grant proposal. Such contributions from the community help to sustain MorphoBank as an important scientific resource.
Curation
There is no charge for researchers to create, modify, and store their morphological data matrices or media in MorphoBank. However, in cases where there are large amounts of image data (hundreds or thousands of media taking many GB of space) that need to be bulk uploaded and interconnected with metadata, we request that you include a budget for this curation and data processing work. This may be entered as a fee for your data repository in your Budget Justification.
Data Management Plan
MorphoBank's mission has been to be long term repository for morphological data matrices and associated 2D or 3D images that are described in peer-reviewed publications. While we have funding from NSF to replatform Morphobank's aging software by 2025 and our membership community is growing, MorphoBank can always benefit from research project-based grant support. We are committed to MorphoBank being an open access resource that is accessible to all, regardless of membership status. If you plan to use MorphoBank as a repository for grant funded projects and your institution cannot become a member (for any reason), we ask that you include a line item in your grant to support MorphoBank's work.
We include some sample text below that can be modified as needed and used in your Data Management Plan.
Sample Text
MorphoBank (www.morphobank.org) is an open access database and curation platform that makes morphological data matrices that are linked to peer-reviewed publications easily discoverable and freely available for reuse. MorphoBank mints DOIs as the persistent digital identifiers at both the Project and Matrix level. DOIs are issued at the time of project publication and the projects themselves link back to the originating publication.
MorphoBank's data and media are backed up on a weekly basis.
MorphoBank strongly encourages grant funded users at institutions that are not currently supporting MorphoBank through membership fees to include funding in their grant proposals to help ensure safe, secure, and free distribution of these data for future researchers. Funds requested in this proposal were calculated in collaboration with MorphoBank staff.
New Feature Development
If you have an idea for a new feature that could make MorphoBank better...
If you would like additional features to be added to the PBDB, and would like PBDB programmers to do this, or to help you do this, we can help you to determine what that would cost. This calculation entails estimating the number of hours your project would cost. Programmer costs are approximately $50/hour. So, a project that would take 500 programmer hours would cost $50 * 500 = $25,000. Again, we are happy to help you estimate these costs when you are preparing your budget. As you are writing your grant, if you envision additional PBDB programming, please contact us at info@paleobiodb.org and we will work with you on adding that into your grant as a direct expense.