Open ILRI
Michael Victor, Abenet Yabowork, Jane Poole, Harrison Njamba, Erick Rutto,
Peter Ballantyne
ILRI open access week workshop
Nairobi, 23 – 25 October 2019

Why be open?
We must We should

ILRI commitments
ILRI open policies - www.ilri.org/open
ILRI open Taskforce - Set up in 2017 comprising DDG (Chair),
representatives from CKM, RMG and Legal & IP, Program Leaders and
CRP Livestock director.
• Key recent activities:
• External review of our repositories
• IPM awareness
• Increasing staff awareness and support materials (this week!)
• Future plans:
• ILRI Digital Transformation analysis (through the Big Data CRP
Platform)
• ILRI Organisational Assessment will include Informatics and
Research Computing

Open opportunities
• Allows direct use of our
work;
• Increases its visibility;
• Increases likelihood of
outcomes and impact;
• Fosters collaboration;
• Facilitates re-use of
products
• Safeguards legacy
API
standards
OPEN
formats
products
articles,
books,
chapters
data
software
code licences
repositories

What do we mean by open?
Accessible
(Standards, meta-
data to expose
data)
Available (in open
repositories)
Applicable
(open processes,
accessible in
languages and
formats)
Triple A approach

What does open cover?
Source: https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/content/what-open-science-introduction

What we are aiming for?
• Empower staff to capture,
connect and converse: share
knowledge with each other
and partners; get the
knowledge they seek;
• Collect, organize and license
all ILRI research outputs for
maximum re-use
• Extend the accessibility and
visibility of ILRI’s research
outputs
• Present ‘evidence base’ for
others to easily find and use

Exercise
With a couple of people next to you:
Why do you think open is important?
What’s holding us back from being open?

How to make your research open

The glue holding it together: metadata and tags

Open Information Products (also images, video,
presentations, smaller datasets, etc …)

Open Data

Open Knowledge Sharing
• Wikis at the core of collaboration
• Stimulating communities of practice
• Yammer as internal communications tool

Open Intellectual Property (IP)

Open multimedia

Working out loud
Facebook
Twitter
linkedin

Reach of ILRI across the web
When open

Exercise
With a couple of people next to you:
Which of these approaches are most useful to
you?
Have you come across something better?

The power of open – Throughout the research cycle
Data
collection
Data analysis
Data re-use to
key
stakeholders
Outputs
(visualise
open content)
Knowledge
travels
(standard
content)
Tracking
attention

ODK - free and open source software to collect
better quality data

R – free and open source platform to analyse
and visualize data

ADGG: open data drives information and advice to
farmers

AReS: visualizes our open content
Current link while we’re updating reports: https://cgspace.cgiar.org/explorer/

Standardized open content easily re-used across
the Internet

Altmetric – tracks ‘attention’ to our open
content
• Altmetrics are metrics and qualitative data that are
complementary to traditional, citation-based
metrics
• Includes citations on Wikipedia and in public policy
documents, discussions on research blogs,
mainstream media coverage, bookmarks on
reference managers like Mendeley, and mentions
on social networks such as Twitter.

Agenda this week
https://www.ilri.org/open-access-week
Thursday and Friday at 1130 – inspirational
presentations; JVC and Addis Infocenter rooms and on
webex
Wednesday to Friday between 1400-1600:
• data clinic – Nairobi outside JVC
• twitter clinic – Addis zebu club
• get yourself open – helpdesk – Addis and Nairobi

Exercise
With a couple of people next to you:
What do you need from ILRI for your research to
become open?
What are you doing that ILRI can learn from?

Agenda this week
https://www.ilri.org/open-access-week
Thursday and Friday at 1130 – inspirational
presentations; JVC and Addis Infocenter rooms and on
webex
Wednesday to Friday between 1400-1600:
• data clinic – Nairobi outside JVC
• twitter clinic – Addis zebu club
• get yourself open – helpdesk – Addis and Nairobi

This presentation is licensed for use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence.
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