Why publishing data in AGRIS

Since the beginning of 2008, Google Scholar indexes all the references of the AGRIS repository, boosting the worldwide visibility and accessibility of the institutional repositories participating to the AGRIS Network. Also due to Google indexing, the AGRIS portal has doubled visits in the last two years and currently has approximately 2,000,000 visitors a year.

The OAI Protocols for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)

The Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), is widely used by content providers and is integrated in several CMS and systems that want to expose their data and make them accessible and harvestable by a wider community.
Content providers, whose repositories use the OAI-PMH protocols for disseminating their data, should be aware that an additional layer should be developed in the code that will allow the repository to export the data using the AGRIS AP XML metadata format.
Some of the institutional repositories, publishing companies or national networks that are currently harvested by AGRIS using OAI-PMH are Scielo in Brazil, Viikki Science Library in Finland, BIBSYS in Norway, National Library of Portugal. AGRIS collects this data via a harvester, based on the OAIHarvester2 Open Source Software (OSS), and that includes the AGRIS AP metadata format as additional prefix.
An OAI-PMH tutorial, accessible at http://www.oaforum.org/tutorial/ describes in detail the steps necessary to implement the protocols in an IR (Institutional Repository).
An additional benefit for the implementation of the OAI-PMH protocols is the registration of your IR at the official registration site for Data Providers.

Depositing data to AGRIS

During the last years, AGRIS has created a metadata framework (the AGRIS Application Profile or AGRIS AP) that minimize the importance of applications and systems and leverages the idea of a common metadata format for data exchange. Content providers are not asked to use "AGRIS tools", such as the ISIS family systems, but are absolutely free to use any system when they want to submit data to the AGRIS database.
FAO/AGRIS has a long and widespread involvement in the development, deployment and maintenance of content management systems, with tools such as WebAGRIS, but has recently adopted a neutral position on the choice of a content management system of its "data partners", although the team is working in parallel with other International Institutions and UN Organizations with the final objective of providing a customization of two important CMS’ (Dspace and Drupal). These are simple plug-ins that will enable the systems to both use AGROVOC to index resources and to export to the AGRIS AP XML format.

Please contact us, should you want to have more information at this regard and if you want to join the community and collaborate on the above projects.

Important international communities and networks, such as the family of CGIAR Centres, although using different systems, have successfully adopted the AGRIS AP format as common metadata for data exchange and all the data is currently regularly published in the AGRIS database.

It is quite evident that metadata should be delievered in an XML format and this is a prerequisite that content providers should keep in mind.
If your Institution or company has a system that can export to the XML format and wish to publish your citations, related to agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, aquatic sciences and fisheries and human nutrition, you need to send a request to agris@fao.org, specifying:

• The name and place of your Institution or Company
• The name and URL (if available) of the Journal or of the repository/database that you wish to include in AGRIS
• The name of the ILMS or system that is used to catalog the references or the service providers that are already indexing the articles from your journals DOAJ, OJS, Scopus, etc.)
• The topics that are handled by the citations that you intend to publish in AGRIS
• The type of format and the schema (if available) that is used for exporting data from your system