Building Blocks for a Data Infrastructure and Services to Empower  Agricultural Research Communities, is the title of a recent paper on the agINFRA project. agINFRA  is a European Union project (funded under the 7th Framework Programme) and aims to provide agricultural research communities with e-infrastructure and services for open data access, sharing and re-use.

This paper presents the projects objectives and data principles while it also summarises the data resources that are covered by the project. agINFRA  facilitates the sharing of broad range of data types which includes; bibliographic data on scientific and grey literature; digital learning and training resources; Geospatial information systems; Plant germplasm and genomics information and Agricultural statistics.The paper provides a step by step approach as to how agricultural research institutions and other stakeholders can participate in, and benefit from, the project.