One of the main issues for agricultural development in the Asia-Pacific region is the lack of accessibility of useful and relevant agricultural information. Main actors in the region need to come together and come to collective decisions to open and share agricultural knowledge. This is now going to happen mid December in Bhutan at the Regional Consultation on Collective Actions for Opening Access to Agricultural Information and Knowledge in the Asia-Pacific Region.

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) promotes and facilitates, through a global network of countries and organizations, the mobilization, access, discovery and use of information about the occurrence of organisms over time and across the planet.

GBIF recently published an interesting article in which the role of citation, peer-review and Intellectual Property Rights are discussed in the context of biodiversity data publishing:

Mark Costello, William K Michener, Mark Gahegan, Zhi-Qiang Zhang, Phil Bourne and Vishwas Chavan, Quality assurance and Intellectual Property Rights in advancing biodiversity data publication (GBIF, 2012)

Agricultural Information Worldwide (AgInfo) is the official journal of the International Association of Agricultural Information Specialists (IAALD). Browse the AgInfo Archives.

AgInfo is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles and information on information management in the fields of agriculture, natural resources and the environment. The journal is abstracted and indexed in Agricola and CAB Astracts and its contents are available in an open access format 12 month(s) after an issue is published.

In order for the Web to attain its full potential as a tool that can improve living standards, reduce conflict and improve governance and well-being, it is important to understand how the Web impacts social, developmental, economic and political dimensions. The Web Index attempts to measure this.

The Web Index, designed and produced by the World Wide Web Foundation, is the world’s first multi-dimensional measure of the Web’s growth, utility and impact on people and nations. It covers 61 developed and developing countries and measures and ranks:

In the article "We are all in this together", the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) is looking at different library consortia cost sharing models. The author is Emma Farrow, Programme Officer in Library Development at INASP.

To get an overview of the distribution of digital repositories over the world, visit the Repository 66 map mashup, a project started in 2007 by Stuart Lewis (stuart@stuartlewis.com) at the University of Auckland.

Repository 66 is based on data provided by ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories) and OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories). The data from these sites are overlayed onto Google maps.

2311 repositories on the map

Currently the map shows 2311 repositories spread over the world. You can search  by repository software and by date of foundation. By clicking on a marker, you receive the availabe information on the repository, like its URL, a short description and a growth graph.

The paper Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories? will be presented at OR2012 by Brian Kelly, University of Bath, and Jenny Delasalle, University of Warwick.

In India social hierarchy is important. Is this refelected in the use of information resources via mobile phones? Do users over-value institutionally-recognized authorities relative to peer-sourced content? This is the main question of the article "Power to the Peers: Authority of Source Effects for a Voice-based Agricultural Information Service in Rural India" published on the website of the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) group.

Yesterday AlertNet published the interview ‘Bridging the knowledge gap between farmers and scientists’. A contribution from CGIAR who urged to support knowledge sharing systems in their RIO+20 Call-to-action.

Today Lisbeth Eriksen, senior librarian at Norwegian University of Life Sciences, held the seminar "Mapping to Dewey" at the National Library of Norway. A presentation on AGROVOC as linked open data and its mapping to the Dewey Decimal Classes (DDC). You can read the presentation online in Norwegian.