GBIF Secretariat now announces a call for proposals to establish mirror sites for its data portal, and to introduce a distributed operation of some of its services, such as indexing the contents of the data providers.

The purpose of these activities is to achieve higher availability through redundancy, higher efficiency through parallel operation, and close contacts to data providers through regionally and thematically available support personnel.

Partial funding for these activities is available for at least two mirror and support sites. More sites can established if the applicants contribute their own resources towards these activities.

This call is open for GBIF Participant Nodes and current data providers. Proposals should be received by 7 March 2005 13:00 GMT+1.

For details, see the document under the "Concerned URL" above.