A Workshop on "Open Access and Agricultural Repositories" took place in Limassol, Cyprus, on October 18th, 2012. The aim of the Workshop was to bring in touch stakeholders from Cyprus (researchers, students, practitioners etc. in the area of agriculture and agricultural research) in order to create and support a network, as well as to present the tools and services developed by related EU projects, like VOA3R and agINFRA, which could be used in order to facilitate the daily research work of the participants.

Imma Subirats from FAO/AIMS made a really interesting introduction to Open Access, which was followed by two case studies of Open Access repositories: The Epsilon from SLU (presented by Urban Ericsson from the Swedish University of Agriculture Sciences) and Organic Eprints (presented by Ilse Rasmussen from the International Center for Research in Organic Food Systems), both based on Eprints software. Following that, there was a session with presentations of the repository tools used in Open Access repositories, like the AgriOcean DSpace (by Dirk Leinders from University of Hasselt) and Eprints (by Alejandro Engelmann from the Swedish University of Agriculture Sciences).

The following session was a hands-on session on the VOA3R portal, as a networking platform for researchers, practitioners and students in the agricultural context. For collecting the feedback both the online questionnaire as well as some additional focused ones provided by the UAH team were used. After the lunch break it was time for another interactive session, supported by the agINFRA project, facilitated by me. The session included a short presentation of the project and its expected outcomes as well as a discussion during which we tried to identify the needs of the participants as regards the tools, services and infrastructure used, barriers they face regarding the open access to content and other aspects.

In general it was a fruitful workshop and I feel really grateful to the people who got involved in it and dedicated their time in order to prepare and present their presentations. I felt really glad that we had the opportunity to engage some stakeholders from Cyprus in such a discussion about Open Access and repositories and I really enjoyed the related discussions that we had with the brave ones who stayed until the end of the Workshop.

This workshop was organized with the support of the EU-founded projects VOA3R and agINFRA, the Agricultural Research Institute of Cyprus (ARI), which was also the local organizer, the Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET) and Agro-Know Technologies and was greatly supported by the FAO/AIMS (Agricultural Information Management Standards) team.