The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) had made its two flagship Journals Open Access few years back. This made the other scholarly reseach journals published by various societies in ICAR to follow the course and transformed their journals as Open Access Journals.

Now the ICAR is in the process of formulating an Open Access Policy for all its constituent establishments for opening up all the agricultural knowledge generated for public use and for this purpose it had started a discussion on its Facebook Fan Page on Opening up of access to Agricultural Knowledge in ICAR.

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.

UNESCO’s Global Open Access Portal (GOAP) which is presenting the status of Open Access to scientific information around the world is in the process of doing a Quality Evaluation of UNESCO’s Global Open Access Portal (GOAP).

For this, it is inviting experts and professionals involved with Open Access to offer their perspectives towards the advancement of Open Access policy by completing a short questionnaire online by March 22, 2013.

The UNESCO’s Global Open Access Portal (GOAP) - Quality Evaluation Questionnaire is available here.

The incentives for participation are as follows:

• Based on permission granted, select quotes with Participant details will be included in the report
• Participants will have their organization featured in the Participant Section of the report

The 6th Africa Agriculture Science Week 2013 is going to be held in Ghana under the theme "Africa Feeding Africa through Agricultural Science and Innovation" during 15–20 July 2013. This is an event to be organized by the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) as a part of three yearly continental gathering of all the stakeholders involved in the African Agricultural Developmentagricultural research and development.

This post is about the growth of Open Access Journals in India with more emphasis on agriculture and allied subjects. We can see that immediately after Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), the Indian Academy of Sciences made all its journals Open Access. To this list Medknow also added few of its journals and till the year 2005 only medical journals were added to the DOAJ. From 2005-06, other subject journals were also listed in the directory.

An Institutional Repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and disseminating, in digital form, the intellectual output of an institution (INASP, 2013). According to ROAR, there are 3,340 and as per OpenDOAR, there are 2,255 institutional repositories in the world and out of which 87 are in agriculture, food and veterinary (OpenDOAR, 2013).

Most of these repositories are build either by DSpace or Eprints which are Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). These software are compatible with Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and make the meta-data of the records easily available to the machines and makes the contents available when queried in any web search engines.

With the endorsement at GCARD2010, CIARD now had became a global movement said Mr. Krishnan Bheenick , Senior Programme Coordinator, Knowledge Management, CTA  one of the panelist at the CIARD session on “Access, sharing and transformation of agricultural data and information”.  

Open Access India: Advocating for Open Access to Scholarly Research in India

Sridhar Gutam
Open Access India
India

The first Open Access Repository in agricultural sciences to be established in India is  ICRISAT Open Access Repository in May 2009. The ICRISAT, had taken lead in the movement and organised Consultation on Enhancing Open Access in Indian Agriculture during Septemember 2009 at Hyderabad.

According to the news item posted on Scidev.net, the Argentina's Chamber of Deputies passed a bill stating that all national scientific institutions must provide open access to the research archives and raw data with six months and five years embargo periods respectively and the law is under consideration by the senate. It can be hoped that when Bayh–Dole Act could influence countries like India to prepare bill for the protection and utilisation of public funded IP bill, 2008, this development would certainly impact the developing countries to bring out bills for making public funded research open access. It may be noted that the recently filed petition by 25,000 open access advocates to Mr.