Opening access to Agricultural Information – Sridhar Gutam, Open Access India How do largely agricultural societies/communities such as in Asia who are in transition to a “knowledge based economy” organize their access and use of knowledge, especially agricultural and that related to food, nutrition and livelihoods. What are the obstacles/barriers/constraints and what are the opportunities? What have we learnt so far to overcome the constraints and make effective use of the opportunities? In Indian NARS, there are >100 scholarly societies publishing peer reviewed journals. Some are online and open access; some are online but closed access; and many are print only journals. Some of these societies get substantial funding from ICAR and source resources by organising national/international seminars and also by membership. However, most of their resources are spent on printing of journals and on postage to send them to the members/clients. Recently the ICAR had established online platform using OJS for online publication of peer-reviewed journals. Few societies have transformed their journals online using the OJS platform of ICAR. There are no data, information, image repositories in agriculture in India except Agropedia/OpenAgri and RKMP. In the RKMP, the data is available but in pdf format. There are no options for download into csv formats for further analysis. No interoperability. The IASRI databook also makes available data in pdf format which is not accessible. The data and information is being made available by these repositories but it’s not accessible for machines. The weather data from IARI is being made available online in html format. Advocacy, Capacity Building and establishment of e-Infrastructure are needed for making data and information available to the public for public good. All the institutes under ICAR/NARS should be advocated for the establishment of repository of data, information (research publications/germplasm) and photographs (of their commodities/germplasm etc) The Indian government data portal http://data.gov.in could be effectively utilised for depositing all the published data in the form of interoperable data-sets. What is the role of the State and its public sector agencies that are major producers of knowledge and intermediaries in its dissemination and use? What can be done to improve this role? The India data portal http://data.gov.in should be populated with available published data. For that data scrapping has to be done. Much of the data is either in pdf softcopies or as in print data books. Online groups like Open Access India and DataMeet are involved in advocacy and establishment of data repository. The ICAR has now its presence on social networks. It is making available some of the videos on youtube for public use and dissemination of the agriculture package of practices. The ICAR’s KVK e-connect model may be extended to connect all the repositories in ICAR/NARS and harvest all the data and information. Who are the emerging new actors beyond the public sector in generating, disseminating and enabling effective use of knowledge in agriculture and related areas? What are their roles? What is needed to encourage and support them, especially from the public sector Institutions, in their functions and roles? The NGOs and other organisations involved in value addition to the available data needs access to the data and information and they should be allowed to access all the published data and information under licensing agreements. The crop weather data and the multi location trial data available with the institutes should be made open for all the institutes in ICAR/NARS to make meaningful analysis of the available data and to formulate their future programmes. A data and information sharing policy and an infrastructure to host the data and information should be in place in all the ICAR/NARS institutes. There is lot of public sector generated data on research which needs meaningful analysis and value addition and packaging for further use.