Opening up of Access to Agricultural Research Information - Australian Science

In, NARS, more than hundred scholarly societies are publishing peer reviewed journals of which many are print only. However, few of them are online and have differential access to the subscribers and public. To encourage e-publishing, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) had established an online publishing platform using Open Journal Systems (OJS). However, very few societies are using this platform to transform their journals into online using this platform. Some of the societies are receiving partial grants from ICAR for publication of their journals. However, with the increase in print and postal charges, the funds are not sufficient to publish journals in hard copies. Even then, these societies are not utilizing the available free and open source software for e-publication of their journals. This shows that there is a greater need for building up the advocacy on opening up of the access to the information in agriculture. The established institutional repositories in NARS are also very few and are efforts of individuals rather than officials in the system... For the first time, the Rice Knowledge Management Portal (RKMP), had initiated opening up of the access to the research data on rice . However, the data is available in pdf format only. Some volunteers may help in making it available as downloadable .csv/.xls formats for further meaningful analysis and also populate Indian government data portal http://data.gov.in with published data in the form of interoperable data-sets.  We don’t find any repository of photographs which we can share for the educational purposes in ICAR/NARS. The exception to this is digital herbarium of DMAPR which hosts some photos of the medicinal and aromatic plants... "