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”.  

During the session in opening remarks as Chair, Ms. Enrica Porcari, Acting Director of Communications, CGIAR Consortium Office had spoken about the challenges and opportunities being faced by CGIAR in information sharing and the initiatives which are building up to see how results published in journals are made accessible and available openly. She added that globally, the funder’s pressure is increasing as they want to see that the knowledge generated from their funds made open and the session is about how could we all plan collectively to make information more accessible and available?

Mr. K. Bheenik had presented about CIARD framework for data and information sharing. While presenting, he had informed to the audience and participants that only <10% of the published information is freely available and accessible and all the information is locked up in journals.  And to address the accessibility and availability issues, CIARD was initiative was born in 2008 with 15 founding partners and now has grown with 375 institutions together having 6 million resources/pages.

Speaking on fostering investment in knowledge sharing approaches for agricultural innovation, Eija Pehu, Project Leader, Gender in Agriculture (World Bank) talked about the Open Access policy of World Bank and the data repository hosting datasets of 8000 indicators of GDP. She informed that barring 10 exceptions, all the data generated in the various projects of World Bank are in Open Access.  She added that the World Bank had put in place visualization of data, mapping tools and applications for all the platforms including applications for iphone/smart phones. She said that demand for data is growing and transparency and monitoring of results would be possible only through opening up of the data and information. She also shared her interactions with NAIP projects in India which are into knowledge sharing.

Dr. William Dar Director General, ICRISAT had given overview of ICRISAT’s approaches to sharing research data and information. The ICRISAT is the first CGIAR centre to establish its Open Access Repository and to have Open Access Policy and Mandate in place. It has made mandatory to deposit post-prints immediately upon acceptance/publication in journals and now are working on development of research data repository. Now ICRISAT repository is having 5700 documents and had 144,000 downloads during the period of May 2011-Oct 2012 at the rate of 300 downloads per day. He had expressed that ICRISAT is now looking for putting into place a single platform of knowledge repository for CGIAR and also thinking about incentives for scientists to motivate them for data and information sharing.

The other panelists’ viz., M. Bohman (USDA), D. Feng (CAAS) and J. Sam (CSIR) had shared their policies, practices, actions and experiences on opening agricultural data and information in their organizations/countries.

After panel discussion, the participants were made into three groups and were asked to come up with action points for the institutional and network collaborations, tools and policies for improving sharing, exchange and effective use of data, information and knowledge regionally and globally. And the outcomes of the discussions were summarized by S. Attaluri (APAARI) and K. Bheenick (CTA).

During the session, the other participants had expressed concern that due to huge fee attached to journals and language barrier, the information sharing through peer reviewed journals had become a challenge. During the wrap up session, the participants were made aware about the AIMS platform and its tools and services.