Opening Access to Agriculture Research Products: The Experience of CGIAR

Enrica Porcari, CGIAR

Date: 23 October

Time: 11:00 - 12:00 pm Rome time (Convert to another time zone)

Join: write to [email protected] before Wednesday, October 17, mentioning the webinar title.

CGIAR is a global partnership that unites organizations engaged in research for a food secure future. Over 8,000 scientists and staff at 15 Research Centers generate and disseminate knowledge, technologies, and policies for agricultural development. They collaborate closely with hundreds of partner organizations, including national and regional research institutes, civil society organizations, academia, and the private sector. Their work is organized in 15 different CGIAR Research Programs that seek to reduce rural poverty, increase food security, improve human health and nutrition, and ensure more sustainable management of natural resources.

Over the past years, major reforms within CGIAR have begun to transform the approach how CGIAR generates and disseminates knowledge, technologies, and policies for agricultural development. In March 2012, a key milestone was achieved: CGIAR agreed upon a common operational framework with a new vision and principles on the management of intellectual assets.

In this framework, results of CGIAR research and development activities are regarded as international public goods. CGIAR is committed to widespread diffusion and use of its research products. To maximize impact and sharing of benefits, CGIAR is envisioning open and free access to all its research results and development activities, with more limited access or other restrictions becoming the exception only justifiable in well-defined circumstances.

Following an overview of the diversity of CGIAR research outputs and the special challenge represented by research data, the presentation will provide examples that reflect the baseline conditions: accessibility to publications and other knowledge within CGIAR Centers, level of openness of databases, researcher attitudes towards more open research processes and outputs, and progress made to define a set of principles to increase availability, accessibility, and applicability of data and knowledge.

The presentation will then summarize the vision and principles put forward in the new CGIAR “Principles on the Management of Intellectual Assets” and highlight five concrete collective actions to make this vision a reality within CGIAR.  The actions were proposed by representatives from CGIAR Research Programs and members of the CGIAR Consortium at a workshop in Montpellier in September 2012 including the following:

• prepare guidelines that translate vision and principles on intellectual assets into norms and standards;
• transition existing gene-banks and breeding efforts into open breeding platforms;
• establish the architecture for open spatial data;
• create an open knowledge commons;
• and build open research management systems.

These five actions represent the first building blocks of a comprehensive data and knowledge management strategy that seeks to ensure that CGIAR research data and knowledge will be more available, accessible and applicable in the future.

Recording and Slides

The recording of this presentation is available on this website. The full presentation is available here or you can review it below.