VOA3R & FAO-AGRIS Press Release

[Under the umbrella of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, AGRIS is the International Information System for the Agricultural Sciences and Technology. According to the website,http://agris.fao.org/, “AGRIS is a global public domain Database with 2690844 structured bibliographical records on agricultural science and technology. 82.24% of records are citations from scientific journals. The bibliographic references contain either links to the full text of the publication or additional information retrieved from related Internet resources.” Detailed information about the Virtual Open Access Agriculture and Aquaculture Repository (VOA3R) can be accessed at http://voa3r.eu/. “VOA3R is a 3-year European project launched in June 2010 and funded by the European Commission... The VOA3R platform will integrate existing open access repositories as well as digital libraries. The most important aim of this effort is to improve sharing scientific and open access research related to Agriculture, Food, and Environment. VOA3R is dedicated to providing a community-oriented platform based on social networking, micro-blogging and social bookmarking. The users of this platform are researchers and academics but also students and practitioners who either want to search for or to publish scientific research results. The technology developed will itself become open source, so that the model of the service can be adopted by enterprises (including SMEs) or other institutions as a value-added, community-oriented model for open access content.”] “The ongoing cooperation between the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)-AGRIS initiative and the European Union project VOA3R enriches their archives and extends their functional reach. While for its sustainability VOA3R requires the historical and global continuity that only a long-running international organization can provide, AGRIS also benefits from VOA3R’s integrated, open access services and academic orientation that play a role in enlarging AGRIS’ network with new research institutions and quality content.The AGRIS initiative was organized by FAO in 1975 to foster shared access to agricultural science and technology information. With the participation of more than 100 countries, AGRIS collects bibliographic references as a global public good. The rise of the Internet has permitted decentralization and a refocusing of AGRIS as the brand name for a network of centres that organize and promote the exchange of agricultural science and technology information through the use of common standards and methodologies. VOA3R is a three year EC-funded pilot project that has provided an advanced community-focused integrated service for the retrieval of open access content. Its powerful and user-friendly combination of services has attracted a network of academic institutions looking for new ways to distribute content while also taking advantage of web 2.0 features such as social media. AGRIS will continue to benefit from VOA3R’s integrated services and growing federation of open archives while VOA3R gains the support and sustainability that affiliation with a United Nations special agency provides. Together, these archives covering agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, aquatic sciences, fisheries and nutrition will keep playing a historically important role; that of providing access to researchers, practitioners and policy makers of not only scholarly articles but also unique grey literature such as unpublished scientific and technical reports, theses, conference papers and government publications.”