The Agricultural Data Interest Group (IGAD) prepares a pre-meeting on the 21st and 22nd of September 2015 in Paris to discuss current challenges of research data management and reflect about possible linkages with other interest and working groups in RDA. 

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is a global initiative reaching out to experts from around the world and across all domains to enable data to be shared across barriers. RDA is working through focused Working Groups (WG) and Interest Groups (IG). IGAD is a domain oriented interest group to work on all issues related to data that is important for the development of global agriculture. It aims to represent all stakeholders collecting, producing, managing, aggregating, sharing and consuming data for agricultural research, policy formulation, and innovation. Furthermore it is a platform to share experiences and paves the way for a number of domain specific working groups. In the past, IGAD brought together worldwide initiatives and projects to present ideas and discuss issues related to agricultural data. 

The next meeting will present a chance to enlarge the group and debate on requirements for Open Access Policies in agriculture, how to increase data availability, accessibility and interoperability as well as on an increased participation of stakeholders in the agricultural sector. The results will be brought to the 6^th RDA Plenary Session that follows this pre-meeting.