AGRIS has been facilitating information exchange and providing access to bibliographic information on agricultural science and technology by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations  since its creation in 1974. To date, AGRIS offers free access to more than 10,000,000 bibliographic records and provides links to access around 2.5 million of full-text research and technical information resources.

Research and technical information resources made visible by AGRIS include journal articles, monographs, book chapters, unpublished science and technical reports, theses, dissertations and conference papers in the area of agriculture and related sciences. As a Service Provider, AGRIS makes your collection of research and technical information visible worldwide.

How to become a data provider

Eligibility

The first step to become an AGRIS data provider is to check your eligibility:

• You can contribute to AGRIS as an institutional repository, journal publisher or as an aggregator. An institutional repository is a collection of bibliographic metadata created within a university or a research institution while an aggregator may gather metadata collections from many different institutional repositories.
• AGRIS does not accept individual author contributions.

It is important that the most important keywords that describe your data collection are related to food, nutrition, agriculture, forestry, fishery, environmental or other related sciences and are included in the AGROVOC multilingual thesaurus.

Minimum Requirements for AGRIS Metadata

The minimum requirements for AGRIS metadata are specified in the Meaningful Bibliographic Metadata (M2B) recommendations. M2B provides data providers with a list of mandatory and recommended properties to be included in the metadata of bibliographic records.

Two special styles are used to signify the importance of the properties: two plus signs “++” (also in red colour) for the mandatory property; one plus sign “+” (also in blue colour) for the highly recommended property

AGRIS accepts common xml metadata formats like Crossref, DOAJ, Endnote, MARC21, Mendeley, METS, MODS, and PubMed. Please specify what metadata standard you are using when you are submitting records to AGRIS for the first time.

The AGRIS team highly recommends to consider LODE-BD Recommendations 2.0 in order to learn about different metadata terms that can be used to describe properties included in the record.

Submitting your metadata

To send your metadata to AGRIS kindly choose any of the following options:

• Sending data by email. In order to submit new data to AGRIS kindly send your data to [email protected] , if you have larger files, you are encouraged to use any file transfer service and use [email protected] as the contact email. Once your data is received, an acknowledgement will be sent to you. Please note that you can also use your reference management software to export your metadata in various xml formats.
• Harvesting environment. If you want to contribute your records from a journal or institutional repository - with an OAI-PMH compliant Open Journal System or repository software, you should provide access to your harvesting environment to enable the metadata to be harvested. Please Send details of your OAI-PMH to [email protected] .

Registering as data provider

AGRIS needs to receive the following details about your institution (to be sent to [email protected]) in order to registration as Data Provider,

After registration, you will receive a confirmation and an AGRIS ID (Identity number). Please indicate this ID whenever you are in contact with [email protected] to facilitate the processing of your request.

Along with your AGRIS registration, the AGRIS Team will add you to the mailing list of the AGRIS Network. In this way, you will be informed about the latest developments of AGRIS and complementary agricultural information services managed by the FAO of the UN. Please let us know (at [email protected]) in the case in which you do not want to be part of the AGRIS Network  mailing list of. You can unsubscribe from the AGRIS Network mailing list at any time without consequences to your AGRIS status.

ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY

AGRIS content is licensed under the international Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY IGO 3.0. license). Please carefully read the terms of this licence before confirming submission of your records to the AGRIS Service Provider. You are also kindly invited to note that:

AGRIS collects metadata (including links to URL to the full-text) and does not collect full-text of the record(s)

• As a Data Provider, you are responsible for the correctness of the data you are going to provide to AGRIS
• The use and access of the AGRIS service is subject to the AGRIS acceptable use policy (please read it together with FAO Copyright Policies)
• By submitting data to AGRIS, every data provider accepts that bibliographical data describing its information resources will be visible worldwide through the FAO AGRIS platform.

New AGRIS OPEN DATA SET (ODS)

AGRIS is currently building up an open data set which can be shared with third parties and ensure an even wider dissemination of information about metadata records. As a Data Provider you can choose to participate in the AGRIS open data set or not. We recommend making you metadata open for the AGRIS open data set to enhance visibility of your information resources. Please let us know if you would like to join the AGRIS open data set with your open metadata.