Berlin Declaration 10th anniversary conference

The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities is a major international statement on Open Access. It emerged in 2003 from a conference on Open Access hosted in Berlin by the Max Planck Society, hence this year’s Berlin Declaration 10th anniversary conference (Berlin 11) was held in its birth place. The main aim of the conference was to review achievements made in Open Access and its role in scholarship and society. The meeting also sought to find a strategic thrust to the future Berlin Conferences.

Berlin 11 started with a pre-conference dedicated to students and open access, and it was at this meeting that the Open Access Button was launched. In the main conference, on the 19th and 20th of November, presentations on different Open Access developments in the world were delivered. The UK Minister of State, responsible for Universities and Science, Willets David delivered the keynote address, which outlined the UK government’s commitment to ppenness.

Key conference achievements:

• Launch of the Open Access Button
• Review of the Berlin Declaration
• Presentation of the ORBi repository as a use case in Open Access
• Review of the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 funding framework
• Encouraging a move to Open Data.

Highlights from & about the community

• AGRIS 2.0 has been released, a mash-up Web application that links the bibliographic AGRIS knowledge to related  resources on the Web using the Linked Open Data methodology. Watch the webinar@AIMS introducing the new AGRIS platform.
• AgriMetamaker 2.0, a tool based on AgriDrupal to generate metadata in AGRIS AP and Dublin Core formats, has been released and is integrated into the new AGRIS portal. More info
• Status of the SemaGrow project after one year: Agrovoc, Agris, data.fao.org are part of the available datasets and AGRIS is serving as the use case for FAO. More info
• The FAO Regional Office for Africa, CTA and IAALD Africa Chapter are conducting a survey of agricultural information centres, libraries and documentation centre in sub-Saharan Africa. More info
• Opportunities to establish Open Source Geo Labs and courses in GIS. More info
• The Italian agINFRA project partners are organizing a special session 'agINFRA Open Stakeholder Day 2014' in June 23-26, 2014. The call for presentations is open. More info
• On the 15^th of November the AIMS editorial team met the consortium of the Tanzanian Climate Change Information Repository (TaCCIRe) project in order to give support and recommendations on the use and integration of vocabularies in DSpace repositories.

Upcoming Events

• Netherlands. 36th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR)
• Netherlands. Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR 2014)
• Germany. GIL (Gesellschaft für Informatik in der Land-, Forst- und Ernährungswirtschaft) - Jahrestagung 2013: IT-Standards in der Agrar- und Ernährungswirtschaft
• India. National Workshop on Digital Libraries using Greenstone
• Online. Free webinar "New Librarians Global Connection: best practices, models and recommendations"
• Ireland. Third Plenary for the Research Data Alliance (RDA)

Glossary

What is Mashup? "A web page, or web application, that uses content from more than one source to create a single new service displayed in a single graphical interface." (Wikipedia)

More information:

• What is a Mashup? Answers by Web Trends and Internet for Beginners
• Why mashups? (blog)
• Mashup Dashboard, thousands of Web mashups with new updates daily
• AGRIS 2.0, a mashup Web application that links the bibliographical AGRIS data to related Web resources

"... enhancing the use of geospatial technologies in agriculture ..."

An interview with Suchith Anand

The AIMS team met Dr. Suchith Anand during the Berlin 11 Open Access Conference. We asked him to answer some questions about the developments in open access to Geospatial resources and projects for developing countries under the "Geo for All" projects.

Read the interview "... enhancing the use of geospatial technologies in agriculture ..." an interview with Dr. Suchith Anand from the "Geo for All" initiative” in the AIMS Interviews section.

The scope of the AIMS Newsletter is to bring under the attention of the AIMS community recent news, events and achievements in the field of agricultural information management. If you have any contribution, suggestion, or need assistance with the newsletter, please contact us at [email protected]

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