The world of scholarly communications is witnessing a watershed revolution, as path-breaking as when the first scholarly journal appeared in the 17th century. The Open Access movement has been widely embraced not only by the scholars but also by Governments, policy makers, professional bodies, publishers, R & D Centres, and institutions in the private and public domains. A number of institutions in India have also begun to put in place policies and practices that will enable wider and easier access to scholarly communication through the use of new technologies but more importantly through well defined policies and demonstrated commitment.

In light of this, FAO and ICRISAT have organized the "First AGRIS Workshop on Open Access in Agricultural Sciences and Technology: Indian Initiatives" as an attempt to bring together heads of agricultural academic and research institutions, policy makers, agricultural researchers, faculty members, library and information professionals, computer professionals and publishers with the objectives to:

• To promote the concepts and principles on which the open access movement is predicated, and build awareness of the importance of OA for users of agricultural information and knowledge in India and the world at large.
• To demonstrate the usefulness of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) framework within the AGRIS network and how the Indian agricultural research and academic institutions can participate and benefit from the AGRIS network.
• To develop a human resources network involved in the open access movement in the agriculture and related sciences domain in India.
• To make participants aware of the information infrastructure, technology, software and tools that may be used to build open access repositories within their institutions.
• To help participants formulate proposals that influence decision-makers within their institutions to initiate policies that promotes open access publishing model for the research output.
• To exchange information on the usefulness of open access policies already in place in the participating institutions and how these have benefited researchers, students and teachers.
• To obtain consensus and agreement from participants ensuring open access to their research output and to develop a plan to expand the open access initiative to other Indian agricultural research and academic centres.

For more information about the workshop and workshop materials please contact Mr. Johannes Keizer at Johannes.Keizer@fao.org or Ms. Gauri Salokhe at Gauri.Salokhe@fao.org.