Openness And Visibility

ICT Update is not just about technology. This issue’s guest editor, Stephen Rudgard from FAO, is a major actor in opening agricultural knowledge online. He has asked a number of experts from different backgrounds to provide their perspective on various aspects of opening content.

There has been an increasing focus, globally, on various aspects of the ‘openness’ of information and knowledge since the early 2000s – open data, open access, open knowledge, open source, and so on. This openness involves, and is affecting, the world of agricultural information and knowledge as much as any other field of research and development. The impacts are being felt at individual, institutional and national and international levels, from policy development to the day-to-day behaviour of individuals.

Open access

Early moves in this process were made by the Open Access (OA) movement and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). OA focuses on a more institutional approach to unrestricted availability on the internet of peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals, while OAI deals with technical aspects of web-based repositories. [...]