Membership is open to any organization or individual who is willing to contribute to the achievement of IOPI's objectives. Once elected, membership continues so long as the member continues to participate actively in the work of IOPI.
There are two classes of membership: Participating Centre members and Individual members. Participating Centres are institutions, departments or other kinds of organizations who wish to participate as a whole in the work of IOPI; Individual members may participate in their own right or as representatives of Participating Centres.
As a voluntary collaborative organization, IOPI depends on authoritative input from its members (both botanical and computing) to achieve its objectives. Additional botanists and computer staff will be employed to assist members in making their contributions, as funds become available.
Since its formation in September 1991, IOPI has had a steadily increasing membership, currently over 90 Participating Centre members and 30 Individual members, in 50 countries spread around the world. The full list of members currently consists mostly of botanists or computer scientists but membership is being extended to others concerned about the lack of global plant information.
Members are entitled to:
Specific benefits to participants in the Global Plant Checklist project include general access to the whole IOPI database. In addition, those who provide datasets will benefit from taxonomic, regional and editorial review by other IOPI specialists around the world, resulting in feedback of additional data to their own projects. IOPI will place these important regional and taxonomic datasets in a global context, and make this information available to a much larger audience than would generally be the case.
Members will be kept informed by the newsletter and electronic mail service of progress in the Checklist and other projects and of availability of products such as publications and new database versions accessible electronically. All publications will be available to members on special terms.
Nominations for membership of either class should be submitted in writing by two members of IOPI, from knowledge of the potential contribution of the nominee to the work of IOPI. Nominations may be sent at any time to the Secretary of IOPI, who will submit them first to the Council for scrutiny before submitting them for approval by members at a General Meeting of IOPI.
International Organization for Plant Information (IOPI), authorized WWW server Membership page. K. Wilson (editor). Last modified: 10 February 1999