The Open Access Thesis and Dissertations (OATD.org) is a discovery tool that focuses exclusively on open accessible Electronic Thesis and Dissertations (ETDs)and was launched this April. The service indexes over 1,5 million Electronic Thesis and Dissertations from over 600 participating universities in the world.

The aim of the service is to provide a global simplified search tool exclusively for Electronic Thesis and Dissertations (ETDs).The OATD.org indexes only graduate-level thesis and dissertations that are freely available for download.The OATD.org is led by Thomas Dowling, director of technologies at the Z.Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University.

KrishiKosh (कृषिकोष), an Institutional Repository under National Agricultural Research System (NARS) is under the process of its launch which can be accessed here. KrishiKosh is made up of two words from hindi. The word 'Krishi' means Agriculture and 'Kosh' means Theca, a case. Yes, definitely, 'KrishiKosh' is a 'Case of Agriculture Knowledge' created/generated in the NARS of India.

Currently KrishiKosh is housing 22210 records of Articles, Books, Institutional Publications, Journals, Conference Proceedings, Reports  and Thesis.

e-LIS, international open repository for Library and Information Science (LIS), is looking for new volunteers to collaborate in the editorial team during mid-2013 and for a two-year period. Established in 2003, e-LIS is as the largest international open repository in the field of library and information science. 

e-LIS is looking for new team members with academic strength and institutional support. The new collaborators will be part of the editorial board which makes possible the ingestion of new documents according to the e-LIS policies and widely used standards. Members of the Library and Information Science community are invited to submit applications to join the current team composed of 60 volunteers from 30 countries. 

The two days conference on open agricultural data, which was initiated by the G8 governments and hosted by USDA and the worldbank was this afternoon successfully concluded. The concluding press release is at  https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4aXVC8hUc3oeEd2NE56LUpzcDA/edit and the  national action plans are documented at  https://sites.google.com/site/g8opendataconference/action-plans

President Obama greeting the participants at the G8 open agricultural data conference.

On the first of May, the day after the G-8 International Conference on Open Data for Agriculture, a special G8 side event will be held at International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) headquarters in Washington, DC.

The event is entitled D8 - Open Data for Agriculture. D stands for data. 8 is for the number of five-minute presentations to stimulate awareness, thought and action on Open Data.

Learn about IFPRI’s Open Data for Agriculture

What’s available, who’s using it, how they’re using it, and how you can access it. The event will feature the following 8 speakers:

The CGIAR has recently announced the progress made towards its openness agenda and reports that the draft CGIAR draft Open Access policy is now in wide circulation among its Research Centres, Research programs, donors and partners.The CGIAR Open Access Policy also plots a clear timeframe for moving the process towards open access forward.The policy is influenced by DFID, the WorldBank and Wellcome Trust's policies and it relies on the open access guidelines from

The G-8 International Conference on Open Data for Agriculture will take place from 29-30 April in Washington, D.C. You can now participate virtually by going to one of the following websites:

• USDA Live website
• World Bank's website
• Data.gov

Download the program

The Development and Management of E-repositories course is now available online on the Ocean Teacher platform.The course addresses the expertise and resources required to establish and manage sustainable repositories and the course topics were reviewed here.

The AgriOcean DSpace component

The AgriOcean DSpace component covers the materials on how to install the tool, common errors experienced during installation, technical management amongst other topics. The following short videos are available as part of the course materials:-

A consultation to evaluate the VOA3R platform has been launched. You are invited to fill the questionnaire to help us to improve this major VOA3R outcome. The survey  questionnaire is available:

• English 
• French

The VOA3R project comes to an end and your feedback is important for evaluating the platform!

More information at the VOA3R website

Please be informed that the search module in VocBench sandbox is temporarily not functioning. We are working to solve the problem as soon as possible. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

The AGROVOC/VocBench Team