Presentation delivered by Stefano Anibaldi during Open Access Week @ AIMS 2012 http://aims.fao.org/oa-week-2012

2. AGRIS, CIARD and
Open Access
• Since 1975, the AGRIS Network has been a global
reference point for fostering “access to and the
exchange of information and knowledge in agricultural
science and technology” among developing Countries.
• In 2007 AGRIS endorsed the Open Access paradigm
• Introducing tools and interoperability standards to
enhance exchange of data
• Promoting the publication of full text research outputs
on the Web
• AGRIS today plays an important role in the CIARD
initiative, collaborating with the CGIAR and GFAR to
create a community for efficient knowledge sharing in
“agricultural research information and knowledge truly
accessible to all”

3. 5 years after
Online availability of content
• The AGRIS Repository is the main output in the AGRIS Network
• With more than 150 institutions, including information and
research centres, libraries, publishers and service providers.
• With more than 4,000,000 bibliographic records of scientific
journals, papers and reports and gray literature
• In the last five years, AGRIS harvested and indexed
approximately 500,000 resources, with a rough 35% containing
the important information on the online availability.
• Only this year, from the 255,317 records indexed in AGRIS,
111,000 contain full-text links.
• Where explicit full-text hyperlinks are not available in the
resource, AGRIS searches Google and frequently retrieves the
full-text article or publication.
• 50% or more of the AGRIS data for the last five years lead the
user to the full-text of the publication.

4. An AGRIS Example

5. An AGRIS Example

7. OA methods and tools
• From 2005, the metadata information for URL links started
to be included by the AGRIS data providers in the
description of the bibliographic reference.
• The OAI-PMH protocols, already widely used by several
important Institutional Repositories and Service providers
(such as ScIELO and DOAJ) showed to be a key means for
the AGRIS data ingestion model.
• A client harvester software was setup and document
management systems were proposed to the AGRIS
community, enabling institutional repositories and libraries
to disseminate content, via the OAI-PMH paradigm, using
common exchange standards.
• AGRIS ingests data from different metadata formats and
supports systems such as the Open Journal System (OJS),
a free journal-publishing software which, today, is widely
used by OA publishers.

8. Awareness of the research
community towards OA
• AGRIS has been witnessing a growing awareness from
publishers and repository managers towards the Open
Access model. Every month, the AGRIS Secretariat receive
a large number of requests by publishers of OA journals who
want to have their data indexed in the AGRIS database.
• This is also especially true since when the AGRIS repository
data is indexed in Google Scholar, becoming one of the web
sites more visited in FAO, but most importantly offering a
greater visibility both to the authors and the publishers.
• The AGRIS’ process of harvesting metadata is facilitated
both by the growing number of OA services registered in the
CIARD R.I.N.G., and from the realization of commercial
providers such as PubMed or Hindawi who have taken
important steps towards the OA business model.

9. Thank you!
Stefano Anibaldi
stefano.anibaldi@fao.org