Open access repository for the brazilian literature on agroecology.

The Brazilian technical and scientific literature on Agroecology is plentiful, is scattered and of difficult access and the hypothesis is that the knowledge of the area was produced but is composed by a knowledge to be organized. These features are barriers and constrains for farmers to use agricultural information as well as for providers of extension services to meet information needs of farmers. In this direction there is a consensus among researchers who study the information that the adequate alternative and adopted in the entire world are the open access digital repositories. Besides taking into account all essential actions to manage technical and scientific information, the open access digital repositories contribute to better communication process of Science. This occurs because such tools create necessary conditions to researchers to have timely, quickly, easy and perpetual access to the information they need to develop their activities. Also help to disseminate the results and provide increase on citation, researcher and institution visibility. A digital repository can be institutional or by topic where the institutional manages and fosters the scientific production of the institution as a whole. Repositories by topic make evident the stage of development of a scientific community. The objective is to describe how the collection of journal and magazines articles, conference papers, documents published by NGOs, government papers, dissertations and thesis, documents on the Internet, agricultural research produced by institutes and universities, etc. will be redeem to create and manage an open access digital repository of the Brazilian bibliographic production on Agroecology host by the Organic Eprints

Online educational repositories for promoting agricultural knowledge

Towards promoting sustainable agriculture and economic growth, the development of the agricultural workforce and set up of innovative agricultural systems are required. Agricultural educational repositories are systems used for storing, reusing and sharing agricultural learning resources. They contribute to agricultural education at different educational levels and target groups. Thus, this paper firstly provides an overview of Institutional Repositories (IRs) and Open Access Archives (OAAs) in Greece and agricultural repositories worldwide. Also, it describes the agricultural repositories that provide access to educational content in Greek and presents experiences from the establishment of Agricultural University of Athens’ (AUA) repository.</jats:p

Towards an architecture for open archive networks in Agricultural Sciences and Technology

The AGRIS Network is an international initiative based on a collaborative network of institutions, whose aim is to promote free access to information on science and technology in agriculture and related subjects. The paper illustrates how the Open Access (OA) and the Open Archive Initiative (OAI) models can be used within the AGRIS Network as a means of solving the problems of dissemination and exchange of agricultural research outputs. The lack of adequate information exchange possibilities between researchers in agricultural sciences and technology represents a significant weakness limiting their ability to properly address the issues of agricultural development. The OA model promotes the dissemination of research output at international, national and regional levels thus removing the restrictions placed by the traditional scientific publishing model. This paper presents the possibility to address the accessibility, availability and interoperability issues of exchanging agricultural research output

How to achieve high customer satisfaction in Sabancı University Information Center

The Sabancı University is a young private university, which started providing education in 1999 in Istanbul. A “Search Conference” had been organized in order to find out “what kind of a university the country needed” and of its structure had been established on this understanding. At the first stage, the vision, the mission and the design of the university were completed, and the foundation of administrative infrastructure and selection of technology systems were materialized. Starting from the days of its foundation, the planning of the information services and facilities had been one of the main issues of the project. The university, which aims to become a world university, was accepted to be a member of the “European Foundation of Quality Management (EFQM)” regarding its activities in the stage of its foundation. A “Student and Staff Tendency Survey” which was implemented in 2001 indicated that the Information Centre was the strong side of the university. At the same time the Center's the statistics covering period of 1999-2007 also indicated that the targets were achieved under the strategic planning of the Center. In 2007, an user satisfaction survey in order to evaluate the conformity of the services and facilities, to identify its strong and weak areas, opportunities and threats through comparison and SWOT analysis for the future, and set up 2007-2011 five-years strategic planning and operational activity plan. The survey indicated that 95% of the participants are satisfied in general with the Center. In addition to these, the results of usage statistics between the years 1998-2009 indicated that utilizing of the services and facilities of the Information Center has increased from year to year. On the other hand, the results of the survey after the orientation programs show that the customer satisfaction is very high. We believe that the followings are the reasons of high user satisfaction. The Centre has a user and process focused pro-active management, learning organization structure, the availability of the suggestion system, continues benchmarking with the competitors and observing management and technological developments in the world. This paper presents to share our applications and plans on high user satisfaction rate, customer relation management activities and future planning

Towards an architecture for open archive networks in Agricultural Sciences and Technology

The AGRIS Network is an international initiative based on a collaborative network of institutions, whose aim is to promote free access to information on science and technology in agriculture and related subjects. The paper illustrates how the Open Access (OA) and the Open Archive Initiative (OAI) models can be used within the AGRIS Network as a means of solving the problems of dissemination and exchange of agricultural research outputs. The lack of adequate information exchange possibilities between researchers in agricultural sciences and technology represents a significant weakness limiting their ability to properly address the issues of agricultural development. The OA model promotes the dissemination of research output at international, national and regional levels thus removing the restrictions placed by the traditional scientific publishing model. This paper presents the possibility to address the accessibility, availability and interoperability issues of exchanging agricultural research output

Research, relativity and relevance : can universal truths answer local questions

It is a commonplace that the internet has led to a globalisation of informatics and that this has had beneficial effects in terms of standards and interoperability. However this necessary harmonisation has also led to a growing understanding that this positive trend has an in-built assumption that "one size fits all". The paper explores the importance of local and national research in addressing global issues and the appropriateness of local solutions and applications. It concludes that federal and collegial solutions are to be preferred to imperial solutions

Women and forestry : operational issues

Women are major actors in forestry throughout the developing world. Women and children are the primary collectors of fuel and fodder for home consumption and for sale to urban markets. This alone gives women a major role in the management and conservation of renewable forest resources. When convinced of the utility and practicality of a forest improvement or management scheme, women can be a powerful lobby to persuade their entire houshold or community to invest the resources necessary to make the scheme work. Involving women in forestry projects often makes the difference between achieving or not achieving project objectives, particularly for the long-term sustainability of interventions.Environmental Economics&Policies,Forests and Forestry,Forestry,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Health Monitoring&Evaluation

Electronic doctoral theses in the UK: a sector-wide survey into policies, practice and barriers to Open Access

Sharing knowledge and research outputs is critical to the progress of science and human development, and a central tenet of academia. The Internet itself is a product of the academic community, and opening access to that community’s most important body of research, doctoral theses, is both a logical and an inevitable development. Progress toward open access to electronic theses has been slow in the UK. Much has been written on the perceived barriers and practical/infrastructural considerations that might explain this, but a comprehensive picture of that progress, and obstacles to it, was lacking. In 2010, a survey of policy and practice in UK HEIs was conducted by UCL (University College London) Library Services (commissioned by the Joint Information Systems Committee, JISC) to address this very issue. Incorporating inputs from 144 institutions currently awarding doctoral degrees, the work provides the first clear and detailed picture of the status of open access to doctoral research in the UK. The mission of the UK Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE) is to promote and support the interests of graduate education, and this it does through dissemination of best practice and intelligence on emergent trends; helping to shape policy and practice for the benefit of the UK HEI sector. This report contributes to that mission by bringing to the membership’s attention the results of this important work by UCL Library Services; a collaboration between UKCGE and the authors of the original work, it sets out the policies and practices that emerged from the survey and also considers what has been learned about the perceived barriers to the implementation of open access to electronic theses. The 2010 survey has enabled, for the first time, a differentiation to be made between barriers that are “real” and those which are unfounded and/or yet to be properly validated. At the same time, the work highlights the progress made in certain critical areas, as well as those that require our greater attention. A positive picture emerges for the UK on the adoption of the electronic thesis, with the majority of HEIs surveyed expected to be providing open access to their theses in five years’ time. A more detailed picture also emerges regarding the primary reasons for requests to restrict access to theses, some of which, notably, apply only to electronic (not print) theses. This has necessarily given rise to new policy developments. There is positive evidence also of collaboration among HEIs to provide an efficient and robust service for accessing electronic theses; pooling their resources and expertise either in the development of their institutional repositories or in operating a joint service. The key driver of open access to electronic theses is the opportunity for UK HEIs to “showcase” their research outputs to the widest possible audience and enhance their impact. There are no reliable means as yet to measure this impact, but there are encouraging early indications that electronic doctoral theses attract significant attention when made openly accessible. Open access to electronic theses may therefore indeed accelerate the sharing of knowledge and the progress of scientific discovery and human development

Optimizing National Transforming Structures for Open Access Agricultural Repositories in Africa

Agriculture is a crucial sector for most of sub-Saharan Africa. In Kenya for instance agriculture is the largest sector in the Kenyan economy, generating a quarter of the gross domestic product and two-fifths of export earnings. Indeed reports have shown that efficient and effective dissemination of agricultural knowledge and information can help governments meet six of the eight millennium development goals. But for this to happen, transforming structures (policies and strategies) that encourage digital documentation of agricultural indigenous knowledge and digitization of valuable information emanating from agricultural research in Kenyan institutions of higher learning and research centres must be formulated, publicized and implemented. The Kenya Agricultural Information Network (KAINet) was established in 2006 in response to a need for coherence in the management of agricultural information and to enhance exchange and access to agricultural knowledge and information through a digital collaborative institutional repository. From a national perspective, KAINet is enshrined in the Kenya government Strategy for Revitalizing Agriculture (SRA). The SRA, launched in March 2004, aims at achieving a reduction in unemployment and poverty through application of, among other things, new technologies and information as the basis for a thriving agricultural system. Besides the SRA, another policy that has been launched to create an enabling environment for projects such as the KAINet initiative, is the National Information and Communication Technology Policy. The paper will look at the KAINet progress in the light of these policies and at what lessons can be learnt from them. In addition, suggestions will also be discussed about the additional digital agricultural content that Kenya and Africa at large can develop to have Africanized open access repositories available on the World Wide Web, which will ensure that Africa establishes her niche in the information and knowledge age