Comment and integration to Andreone et al. 2022 “Reconnecting research and natural history museums in Italy and the need of a national collection biorepository”

In Andreone et al. (2022), the authors described a background about the Italian Natural History Museums (NHMs) situation, highlighting difficulties regarding the coordination among institutes due to the fragmented landscape, from the past until today. They suggested how having a national institute, the Future National Biodiversity Centre (FCNB), woul d represent the best solution to the problem. Our vision regarding the lack of a national natural history museum in Italy does not coincide with that of the authors, but we do not consider clarifying this aspect in the present letter. On the other hand, since the authors reported how “the present fragmentation of museums and associated collections does not allow for an effective participation of Italy to global models of aggregated natural history databases (such as the VertNet, iDigBio, GBIF)”, we believe it is necessary to address the issue linked to the digital sharing of Italian collections. We present more clarifications about Italy’s commitment to the digitisation and sharing of NH collections data through the DiSSCo RI “Distributed System of Scientific Collections Research Infrastructure” of which Italy is one of the 23 European partner countries since 2018.