Dear reader,

During 2016, the Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA) programme registered a number of mile stones.

The most noticeable development being the upward growth in the collections deposited and made available through AGORA and the increase in the usage of these collections. AGORA saw a massive 1,209 new journal titles being added  - bringing AGORA journal collections to more than 6,565 journals and, correspondingly, a number of e-book collections were added - the e-book collection grew to over 22,000! The e-books came from reputable publishers such as Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Oxford University Press amongst many others. This addition included also the Nature & Faune journal published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO of the United Nations). Another significant addition was the SHARE dataset. SHARE is a collection of open-access data and enriches AGORA with data making AGORA users benefit from direct access to an additional 125 open access data providers.

During the same period, AGORA registrations and usage continued to increase with most users coming from Africa, Asia and also in some eastern European countries. This is partly due to a number of capacity development activities dedicated to Research4Life and AGORA in Namibia, Myanmar, Tanzania,Ghana and Bolivia. Similar capacity development activities are earmarked for Zimbabwe, Nicaragua and Laos. The impact of these trainings have been the increase in usage numbers, for example from the first half of 2016 – user logins have considerably grown. In Myanmar, usage numbers grew by more than 1,000 logins per month. The number of registered organizations have also increased significantly with registrations doubling since October 2016. Finally, AGORA programme stands to technically benefit from the Research4Life’s choice of the PortSys Total Access Control (TAC) that ensures critical access and authentication to Research4Life’s nearly 70,000 peer-reviewed scientific journals, books and databases for researchers, providers and policymakers in low and middle income countries.

To register with the AGORA programme kindly click here. 

About AGORA 

AGORA is one of the four programmes making up Research4Life (R4L) - whose goal is to contribute to the attainment of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). AGORA provides free or low cost access to more than 6,565 peer-reviewed journals and 22,000 books in agriculture and related biological, environmental and social sciences. R4L provides a big share of peer-reviewed contents for free to institutions in group A countries and for a small fee to group B countries.  AGORA/R4L is complementary to Open Access programme and aims at improving the quality and effectiveness of agricultural research, education and training in low- and middle-income countries.  

Highlights

• GACS structural survey and hierarchy scenarios.  The Global Agricultural Concept Scheme (GACS), version Beta 3.1, was released in May 2016. One of the known weaknesses of GACS in its current form is the concept hierarchy (BT/NT relationships). More info
• ‘Open in Action’ in Agriculture & Beyond. Each year, the International Open Access Week celebrates Open Access as the new default in scholarship and research. Read a short overview of some initiatives focused on agriculture and related domains that took place during the last week. More info
• FAO and World Bank experiences in using drones for improving governance. FAO and World Bank met to share experiences in using drones for improving governance and support to developmental projects. More info
• Cost, Profit and Selling Price Calculator for a Simple Farm Enterprise.  The  Agricultural Research Institute  of Cyprus has developed a simple web application for farm enterprises with a single product. More info
• OpenCitations project and its main product OpenCitations Corpus open repository help to publish bibliographic citation information in RDF and to make citation links as easy to traverse as Web links under a Creative Commons public domain dedication. More info
• ‘The State of Open Data’ Figshare’s Report: global trends around Open Data. The Report gathers insights and narratives from leading professionals in the OD space from around the globe and highlights the extent of awareness around open data. More info
• Use oaDOI link and find an open version of the article!  An oaDOI link is like an alternate Digital Object Identifier (DOI) resolver, with a useful difference: if there's an OA version of the article, the oaDOI URL will send you there. More info
• OpenUP : a new EU-funded Open Science Project. OpenUP project – funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 - addresses challenges of the currently transforming science landscape and aspires to come up with toolboxes for the review-disseminate-assess phases of the research life cycle. More info
• New 1,209 journals on AGORA since July 2016! This latest addition represents an enormous boost to the online collection, with over six thousand journals and twenty two thousand books. More info
• GODAN Action selected to be presented in the 4th International Open Data Conference. The GODAN Action project will be presented in the 4th International Open Data Conference (IODC16) that will take place in Madrid, Spain from the 6th until the 7th of October 2016. More info
• Research4Life Chooses PortSys’ Total Access Control to Ensure Critical Access and Authentification. PortSys announces adoption of its Total Access Control product by the Research4Life partnership to replace end-of-life Microsoft authentication system. More info

Mark your calendar for upcoming events

• Workshop: Open Data and Agriculture (09 – 11 November 2016)
• OpenCon conference (12 – 14 November 2016)
• FAIR data management: RDA National Event in Italy (14 – 15 November 2016)
• Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing (21 – 22 November 2016)
• 10th International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR’16) (22 – 25 November 2016)
• SWIB16 - Semantic Web in Libraries Conference 2016 (28 – 30 November 2016)

For more events check out AIMS Calendar

The scope of the AIMS Newsletter is to bring under the attention of the AIMS community recent news, events and achievements in the field of agricultural information management. If you have any contribution, suggestion, or need assistance with the newsletter, please contact us at [email protected].  You received this message because you are subscribed to the AIMS Newsletter