Opening access to agricultural information in Ghana Kenya…

Opening access to agricultural information in Ghana, Kenya and Zambia :

« Agricultural innovation systems in Africa need to have access to both local and global agricultural sciences and technical information if they are to have an impact on agriculture and food security initiatives on the continent. While access to global agricultural information resources and innovations is relatively easy, local agricultural content is generally not visible and easily accessible. Providing access these important resources, through institutional repositories of metadata records and associated full-text documents, is one pathway of ensuring that the content generated locally is easily accessible within the country, region and around the globe. This paper highlights three initiatives implemented by national research institutes in Ghana, Kenya and Zambia aimed at opening access to agricultural information and knowledge resources. It also presents the major challenges faced in the implementation of the initiatives and the key lessons learned that could be useful when implementing similar initiatives. »

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18921/

A Two-Dimensional Approach to Evaluate the Scientific Production of Countries (Case Study: The Basic Sciences)

The quantity and quality of scientific output of the topmost 50 countries in the four basic sciences (agricultural and biological sciences, chemistry, mathematics, and physics and astronomy) are studied in the period of the recent 12 years (1996-2007). In order to rank the countries, a novel two-dimensional method is proposed, which is inspired by the H-index and other methods based on quality and quantity measures.

The countries data are represented in a « quantity-quality diagram », and partitioned by a conventional statistical algorithm (k-means), into three clusters, members of which are rather the same in all of the basic sciences. The results offer a new perspective on the global positions of countries with regards to their scientific output.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.2698

Information and Computation

In this chapter, concepts related to information and computation are reviewed in the context of human computation. A brief introduction to information theory and different types of computation is given. Two examples of human computation systems, online social networks and Wikipedia, are used to illustrate how these can be described and compared in terms of information and computation.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.1428

Research Data Symposium

Research Data Symposium Panel 1: Plan and Collect

Research Data Symposium Panel 2: Assure, Describe, and Preserve

Research Data Symposium Panel 3: Integrate and Analyze

Research Data Symposium Panel 4: Discover, Share, and Impact

Sustainability of Open Access Resources The Collective Provision…

Sustainability of Open Access Resources : The Collective Provision of Open Access Resources :

« This report is the third in a series which examines issues relating to the economic sustainability of critical infrastructure services that support the operation and growth of open-access dissemination of scholarly and scientific research. This report is intended to guide funders and project planners in constructing and coordinating collective funding models capable of supporting open-access infrastructure resources. The report:

  • reviews the fundamentals of robust sustainability modeling (Section 2);
  • outlines the economic and institutional issues that confront those seeking to sustain free infrastructure services and discusses the implications of free models for an initiative’s ability to provide an optimal level of service (Section 3); and
  • dentifies strategies for overcoming institutional free ridership in the design of funding models and describes practical mechanisms for coordinating the collective provision of infrastructure services (Section 4). »

URL : http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/collective-provision-of-oa-services.pdf