Open access information sharing on Indian agriculture research
Thursday, 16 November 2006, 20:30 IST
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New Delhi: A new open access initiative on sharing information on agricultural research in India online has been launched to help promote documentation in the subject among researchers. Open access implies the free online availability of digital content. It is best known and most feasible for peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly journal articles, and also gives a huge boost to the sharing of knowledge without being hampered by having to pay. The Hyerabad-based International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations said it has launched an initiative to promote open access information sources in agricultural sciences and technology in India. This initiative was launched at the First AGRIS workshop on open access in agricultural sciences and technology earlier this month organised at the ICRISAT headquarters at Patancheru, on the outskirts of Hyderabad. In the workshop, there were library and documentation specialists from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) institutes and state agricultural research universities. There were also representatives from specialised institutions such as the National Institute of Agricultural Extension Management (MANAGE), the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) at Bangalore, and the National Informatics Centre (NIC). "Launching the first phase, the participants of the workshop decided to suggest the establishment of two pilot open access information repositories in the agricultural domain within the first year," said ICRISAT media officer S. Gopikrishna Warrier in a statement. One repository would be in Delhi with support from ICAR, and the other in Hyderabad with support from ICRISAT and MANAGE. Deputy Director General of ICRISAT Dyno Keatinge said the new initiative would create a platform for information sharing on agricultural research in India. Indian National Knowledge Commission vice-chair P.M. Bhargava said that this technology and its application can take agricultural information sharing into a new paradigm. Though open access documentation systems have been popular in many other areas of science communication in India, it is not being used in agricultural research documentation. This initiative has been launched to bridge this gap, ICRISAT said. "It will also implement lessons learnt from existing global open access systems such as AGRIS and the international information system for the agricultural sciences and technology, initiated by FAO," said Warrier. The AGRIS Secretariat in Rome has taken up several new initiatives in the last few years in the face of exponential growth in available information on agricultural research. Development of new metadata (information that describes how, when and by whom data has been collected and formatted) standards to share information coupled with Free Software and Open Source software now in use can ensure open access for users worldwide. ICRISAT argued that the new open access agriculture information will enable agricultural scientists to obtain information through the Internet that are more searchable, more value added information such as who is the writer, citation and source credibility. There are variations in open access publishing. "Golden road" involves journals making their articles openly accessible immediately on publication. On the other hand, the "green" road (or open access self-archiving) sees authors make copies of their own published articles openly accessible, generally in a subject or institutional repository. Open access is the subject of much discussion amongst academics, librarians, university administrators, government official, commercial publishers, and learned society publishers. While questions have been raised about the economics of funding open access research, this undoubtedly gives a boost to the sharing of knowledge among researchers.
Source: IANS
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