The CGIAR Consortium continues its journey towards transforming CGIAR into an Open Access organization. Making agricultural research, knowledge and information more widely available is part of a growing global movement, and CGIAR is committed to playing a dynamic role in the process.
This week, the CGIAR Consortium and several of its members and partners have been taking part in the G-8 International Conference on Open Data for Agriculture held in Washington D.C. from April 29-30. The conference’s mission is to obtain “commitment and action” for policies and projects that open access to “publicly funded global agriculturally relevant data streams, making such data readily accessible to users in Africa and worldwide.” The ultimate aim is to ensure that broader access to agricultural knowledge contributes to greater food security, especially in developing countries.
As part of the meeting, G8 delegations developed Action Plans that include commitments to move towards improved Open Data for Agriculture. Included in the Action Plan from the UK, was the statement: “The UK Government will support the implementation of the Open Data roadmap for CGIAR.”
The CGIAR Consortium is already well on the way to making Open Access the norm within its Research Centers and Research Programs. With CGIAR generating massive volumes of research and knowledge products for agricultural development, access is an issue of major significance. In March 2012, the CGIAR Consortium approved the CGIAR Principles on the Management of Intellectual Assets, which stipulate open and free access to all research results and development activities.
Earlier this month, a meeting held at CGIAR Consortium member Bioversity International headquarters in Rome, discussed CGIAR’s Open Access policy (currently in draft) and plans for mainstreaming Open Access for CGIAR. Policy approval is expected later this year, with implementation guidelines due to be completed by June 2014.
The G8 Conference on Open Data for Agriculture is an important occasion for driving the open access for agriculture movement forward and shaping its development. It addresses one of CGIAR’s four research focus areas – increasing food security – and will promote concrete proposals for making more key data freely available online and improving transparency.
Read CGIAR’s Commitment to Open Data for Agriculture.
Innovative ideas
In the run-up to the event, the Agricultural Information Management Standards launched a call for ideas to identify initiatives or future projects which demonstrate the potential that open data can have for ensuring food security.
Among the wide range of innovative products and ideas put forward by CGIAR Consortium Members, the International Food Policy Research Institute’s (IFPRI) Food Security Portal was selected to be showcased at the conference.
This is a platform designed to provide detailed country-by-country information on food policy developments. Country profiles provide insight into indicators for livelihoods, food production, exports and imports and commodity prices. Datasets allow easy monitoring of price changes at global and country level and commodities graphs track global prices. A Terms-of- Trade Effect tool provides a quick and easy way to assess the country level impact of a change in world commodity prices, while a Short-Run Impact of Releasing Food Stocks simulator allows users to model the impact of a release of stocks of a particular commodity.
Other innovative information products submitted by the CGIAR Consortium range from the HarvestChoice Mappr – offering more than a hundred layers of agricultural data for sub-Saharan Africa to build up a picture of just about any location – to Insect Life Cycle Modeling (ILCYM), a tool to develop models for predicting insect build-up so as to prevent crop damage. These platforms were submitted by IFPRI and the International Potato Center (CIP), respectively, both members of the CGIAR Consortium.
Other notable ideas submitted were:
- The CGIAR Generation Challenge Program’s Integrated Breeding Workflow System (IBWS), an information system linking local and current breeding data to public crop information.
- The Iraq Salinity platform, developed by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA). This platform brings together all information generated by the Iraq Salinity initiative – a research and advocacy project on approaches to reduce the effect of salinity on agriculture and food security, and make it more widely available as a public good.
- The Data Harvester – Test Bed. This platform, developed by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), is a test bed open agri datasets harvester. It harvests metadata from institutional data repositories and aggregates them, offering choices of access points.For a full list of ideas submitted by CGIAR click here.
More information:
- Making progress towards Open Access for CGIAR
- G-8 International Conference on Open Data for Agriculture
- IFPRI “D8” Side Event, May 1 2013
- Agricultural Information Management Standards
- CGIAR Opening Access; moving from piecemeal to panoramic
- Opening Access to Agriculture Research Products: The CGIAR Experience
- A roadmap for moving CGIAR towards open access: A major milestone
- Moving CGIAR towards open access
- Insights into researcher behavior: attitudes towards opening access
- Working together to better manage CGIAR intellectual assets