Results of the New AGRIS Vision 2007-2012: advocating for Open Access to Research

Stefano Anibaldi

Food and Agriculture of the United Nations (FAO)

Italy

Since 1975, the AGRIS service has been aggregating and freely disseminating data coming from disperse institutions all over the world with the final objective to improve access to and the exchange of information and knowledge in agricultural science and technology among developing Countries. 2007 was a crucial year for the newly envisioned AGRIS architecture:  the firm belief that the AGRIS network was committed to improving access to full-text documents was made explicit by the increasing number of URLs linking to open access publications. At that time, this important metadata information started to be included, by the librarians and publishers of the AGRIS Network, in the description of the bibliographic reference, and the OAI-PMH, already widely used by several important Institutional Repositories and Service providers (ScIELO and DOAJ in primis) were considered as a key means for the AGRIS data ingestion model.

A client harvester software was activated and information library systems such as AgriOcean Dspace and AgriDrupal were proposed, thus enabling institutional repositories and libraries to disseminate content, via the OAI-PMH paradigm, using common exchange standards. This has enormously facilitated the publication of metadata records with relevant URLs linking to the fulltext.

However, rather than software and data, AGRIS has been witnessing a growing awareness from publishers and repositories managers towards the Open Access model. Every month, the AGRIS Secretariat receive a huge amount of requests by publishers of OA journals that want to have their data indexed in the AGRIS database. This is also especially true since when the AGRIS data is indexed in Google Scholar (2008), with a web traffic boost of 80, 85%, which offers greatest visibility to the internet users but especially to the authors of the scientific articles.

How to Join?

This presentation is part of a one hour session entitled Promotion of Open Access containing 3 short presentations that will take place on Thursday 25 October 2012 (11:00-12:00 pm Rome time). To join this session, visit the main page for the Open Acces Week @ AIMS webinars.