Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore addressing the accessibility, availability and interoperability issues of exchanging agricultural research output by means of the AGRIS application profile – an exchange metadata standard – and controlled vocabularies or subject-specific knowledge organisation systems.
Design/methodology/approach – Based on an analysis of the open access (OA) publishing model and the open archives initiative (OAI), the authors share their proposal for the architecture for open archive networks in agricultural sciences and technology.
Findings – The lack of adequate information exchange possibilities between researchers in food and agricultural sciences represents a significant weakness, limiting the research system to properly help address the issues of agricultural development. The OA publishing model promotes the availability of content online, including grey literature, which is not available through commercial distribution channels but which significantly contributes to agricultural research and development. The new architecture proposed in this paper is based on these OA and OAI paradigms and has three components: the creation of content with agreed content description standards, the harvesting of the content using common exchange standards and the value-added services provided to the users using the exchanged standard content.
Originality/value – The paper presents how the agricultural sciences and technology community can adopt the OA model and OAI tools. The paper will be useful to information professionals who are planning to improve the accessibility and interoperability of the agricultural research produced in their institution by the creation of institutional repositories.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/29/2008 11:10:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
