A long history of US-Mexico cooperation

An important form of collaboration between countries is data-sharing. The idea that the raw data product of research should be shared freely is yet to be fully implemented. In this presentation I describe how the "Biodiversity Information System" (SNIB) of Mexico began as a collaboration between American and Mexican ornithologists, and how this later evolved to create software protocols to share, on-line and in real time large taxonomic databases. I describe SNIB, highlighting the amount of data that is based in non-Mexican institutions, and the major players. I will describe some technological and social hurdles to this type of collaboration.