Enhanced visibility and access to Inra's publications on a subject (landscape ecology) through open archive

The French National Institute for Agricultural Research is the second largest institute for agronomic research in the world. One of its main goals is to enable free access to its research findings. To attain this goal, INRA signed the 2003 Berlin Declaration on open access in 2004.INRA’s first step to promote free access to its scientific publications was to retrospectively digitalize former issues of journals supported by INRA and help establish the author-pays business model. Since 2007, INRA’s goal has been to gradually develop strategies to help researchers register their publications in the institutional open archive ProdInra. Here we give an illustration of the advantages of having an open archive and free access to scientific publications for the example of studies on landscape ecology. To achieve this aim different measures have been taken:- Identify Thematic Portals that can convey the work of INRA and work with these partners.- Develop strategies in terms of the choice of tools.- Use a specific index that can identify more easily a particular topic.- Develop specific tools to enhance the image of conference proceedings by participating in the organisation process. These tools are destined to make the authors whose paper/article have been selected more aware of the importance of their publications and encourage them to publish their paper before the symposium. This would be permitted by international licences on open archives.- Talk with our researchers about the advantages for them to archive their publications. Results: The presentation will deal with these issues concerning "landscape ecology" based on ProdINRA's tools. Publication of the international symposium Cucubitaceae 2008's conference proceeding using free software "Dspace" as well as the Symposcience's project/website to update seminars will also be presented as examples. Discussion: The choice of open source products is independent of the will to disseminate the work and involvement towards open access. INRA has chosen a tool for reasons of corporate strategy, which ultimately does not change the philosophy of open archives and open access. The open archives are an interesting media for accessing to scientific information but we must ensure the quality of the online documents so that this medium is not viewed as producing sub-editorial product. Furthermore, it is important to enhance the capacity for information retrieval as well as the transfer of documents within other thematic open archive with OAI-PMH. Our main aim is to deal with the distribution of the full text as the deposit is not yet systematic. This will be INRA's scientific information strategy for the coming years