Yesterday a small group of aginfo enthusiasts met at Wageningen UR to exchange experiences on the ways they make their information more accessible. It offered a rich insight into some practicalities of becoming ‘truly accessible’ – as the CIARD initiative calls on us to be.IAALD Board member Barbara Hutchinson opened, explaining AgNIC’s ‘born digital’ and ‘re-born digital’ initiatives that aim to provide “persistent long-term access" to the research outputs of US agricultural research and extension. She particularly highlighted the issue of ‘link rot’ – where after even a short period, many web resources can no longer be found via their URL. See her presentation.Ingeborg Nagel and Harry Heemskerk introduced ‘Search4Dev’ a new repository that the Royal...
Yesterday's meeting on aginfo accessibility was a good opportunity to hear more about experiences in this area of Wageningen UR.Hugo Besemer shared experiences with two projects: ‘Wageningen Yield' (see also earlier story) and ‘Groen Kennisnet’ – or ‘green knowledge net.’It seems that the Wageningen repository is now rather complete – they collect and index all resources created by WUR staff, even if they can’t yet make them all publicly accessible (due to license restrictions etc). For some other organizations, like the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, whose web site content management system changes often, WUR maintains an accessible ‘e-store’ of full text documents, giving them each a permanent address on the web.According to Besemer, the key to success so far is the...
At yesterday's informal meeting on 'Making Agricultural Information Available and Accessible,'Wilma Roem explained how the LEISA repository of ILEIA and its 6 partner organizations works to make accessible the practical information on sustainable agriculture they have created in the past 25 years. Through the www.leisa.info website, they make accessible a repository of 4100 full text multilingual articles from the journals published by the network partners (located in different parts of the world). This is both the recent ‘born digital’ material as well as older content that has been ‘re-born digital’ through digitization.Their repository contains full text documents in PDF and html formats; they encourage translation and re-use of the content, they recently introduced RSS feeds...
In Yesterday's small meeting in Wageningen, we discussed ways to make information more accessible.What were some take away messages from the presentations and discussion?1. A fundamental challenge is for each organization to provide or guarantee permanent access to their own outputs, the publicly funded ones at least. When URL’s change, we can of course search for their new locations. But isn’t there a responsibility of ‘publishers’ to give their content permanent addresses? The model where WUR provides a de facto permanent national archive of Dutch agricultural outputs – through its e-store - is perhaps interesting to explore elsewhere. Even as organizations re-vamp their web sites, moving and even deleting outputs, they all remain accessible in one reliable location.2. Even...
Wageningen Yield (WaY) is the access point to publications from Wageningen University and Research Centre. WaY contains references to publications authored by Wageningen University staff from 1976 onwards, including many in full text.WaY encourages authors to publish according to the Open Access Principle. Content in WaY can also be harvested according to the OAI-PMH protocol. Access to each research unit's outputs is enhanced through RSS feeds listed from the 'browse' option on the menu.Beyond search an retrieval, the service shows how staff publications and reports can be searched and sorted to provide publication lists, by author, research team or research theme. Academic staff contributing to the system can therefore get something...
The Science Dissemination Unit of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics just published a 'compendium of selected literature on Open Access in scientific communication.The report, as can be seen in the embedded image below, is as interesting for its online format as it is for its content.open the publicationThe publishing platform is called Issuu. According to its blurb, it is "the place for online publications: Magazines, catalogs, documents, and stuff you'd normally find on print. It's the place where YOU become the publisher: Upload a document, it's fast, easy, and totally FREE. Join a living library, where anyone finds publications about anything and share them with...
A recent paper by staff of the Embrapa (Brazil) Technological Information Division presents a methodological model for the establishment of Open Access to scientific information at Embrapa.According to the authors, the model proposed, supported on Open Access rules, will contribute to effective acceleration and improvement of internal and external scientific communication. It will do this by:Promoting scientific production, researchers and institution’s visibilities, with great potential to enhance impact of results from research at Embrapa;Providing the scientific information management methodology, directed to the internal and external knowledge management (identification, capture, storing, organization, retrieval and largely dissemination);Associates and preserves the scientific...
Major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions have joined forced in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The plan is to digitize their holdings of published literature, making it available through a global 'biodiversity commons.'"For the first time in history, the core of our natural history and herbaria library collections will be available to a truly global audience. Web-based access to these collections will provide a substantial benefit to people living and working in the developing world -- whether scientists or policymakers."Making the content open access is an important element of the project. In a presentation on the project, this is described as "all content can be reused, repurposed, reformatted, sliced, diced, scraped, harvested,...
A group of 42 information specialists from various organizations participated in the course on 'Open Archives for Development' held June 11 through 13, 2007, organized by AGRORED Perú and coordinated by AIBDA Peru and E-LIS Peru with the collaboration and technical support of FAO. Representatives of the FAO and IICA Country Office in Peru also participated in the course.
Participants from Lima...
IAMSLIC (International Association of Aquatic and Marine Science Libraries and Information Centers), FAO,and other partners are working towards the establishment of a coordinated 'aquatic commons' - to include a digital repository and harvester for fisheries and marine science.
The proposed model includes an 'open access OAI compliant repository' and a 'thematic harvester' offering federated...
In the May-June 2007 issue of American Scientist, Alma Swan asks if open access can advance science? She argues that the answer is yes, and that the "advance of science is the prime reason that access is an imperative." Further, "open access can advance science and will do so more and more effectively as more scientists make their work freely available."
How to do this? While...
A recent paper from FAO outlines how open access architecture and models can be used within the AGRIS Network to share and disseminate research outputs.
The proposed architecture combines the experience and history of the AGRIS network with the new scholarly Open Access publishing paradigm and the international Open Archive Initiative. Implementation of this architecture will lead to a very...