Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Open Data and Open Science: Challenges and Benefits of Sharing Data in Agriculture Imma Subirats Coll Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Forum on Open Data, Open Science and Open Access to Information in Agriculture in the Context of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)   Monday, 18 April 2016 Avani Hotel - Windhoek, Namibia

Agriculture is a major contributor to the global economy Agriculture accounts for 65% of Africa’s workforce and 32% of the continent’s GDP. In some of Africa’s poorest countries, including Chad and Sierra Leone, it accounts for more than 50% of GDP

import.io Open data builds upon and extends a rich tradition of knowledge and information sharing in the sector

Open data Data anyone can access, use and share. It must: be accessible, which usually means published on the web be available in a machine-readable format have a licence that permits anyone to access, use and share it While closed data is Data that only data owners or people within an organisation can access, for reasons like privacy, commercial sensitivity and security. Availability and Access: the data must be available as a whole and at no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably by downloading over the internet. The data must also be available in a convenient and modifiable form. Re-use and Redistribution: the data must be provided under terms that permit re-use and redistribution including the intermixing with other datasets. Universal Participation: everyone must be able to use, re-use and redistribute - there should be no discrimination against fields of endeavour or against persons or groups. For example, ‘non-commercial’ restrictions that would prevent ‘commercial’ use, or restrictions of use for certain purposes (e.g. only in education), are not allowed. GODAN

Challenges?

It was officially launched in 2013 at a G8 meeting in recognition of the importance of open data to address food security, malnutrition and build sustainable agricultural systems to feed future generations.

Forums on Open Data and Open Science Dedicated to Agriculture and Africa Half-day event, targeted to senior policy officers/managers Main events are an experts and senior policy officers’ panel discussion followed by a facilitated discussion

Objectives Strengthening access to agricultural science and technical information in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)  Providing a dialogue platform where senior agricultural experts in SSA can articulate some of the challenges to Open Data and Open Science and propose possible strategies

Expected outcomes A common understanding the role of open data and open science Clarification of the institutional, national and regional policy implications for open data and open science Agreement on the mechanisms, technologies and standards for sharing open data and open science initiatives

Series of Forums 1st Forum. 15 – 17 June 2015, Nairobi (Kenya) 2nd Forum 18 – 20 April 2016, Windhoek (Namibia) 3rd Forum 23 – 25 May 2016, Dar Es Salaam (Tanzania) 4th Forum 11 – 13 July 2016, Accra (Ghana)

Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)

Open Science Opening up all aspects of scientific research, to allow others to follow the process and collaborate No formal definition of open science, but it usually incorporates some of the aspects we looked at before, such as open access, open peer review, post-publication peer review, and open data

Areas of Open science Area What is done By whom? Who can access publications Gold / Green open access Learned members of society Who can access data Open data, data repositories Scientists, “App developers”, “App users” = Society Society can understand science Different writing style, twitter, blog, … Society Society does the research Citizen science Scientists, Society Scientists work together Collaboration environments (e.g. Open Science Framework) Science Science can be verified Open Peer review, retention of research data Enabling environment Other rewards, other performance metrics Scientists Fecher, Benedikt, and Sascha Friesike. "Open science: one term, five schools of thought." Opening science. Springer International Publishing, 2014. 17-47.  Nancy Pontika; Petr Knoth; Matteo Cancellieri; Samuel Pearce (2015). "Fostering Open Science to Research using a Taxonomy and an eLearning Portal". Myself

Wheat Data Interoperability WG

Rice Data Interoperability WG Put together a survey to gather different type of Rice data Adapt outputs from the Wheat Data Interoperability Working Group to rice datasets Deal with the heterogeneity of data sets: develop data registry of relevant available rice data sets Work on harmonization of existing sets of ontologies/vocabularies from existing different efforts, and be able to tag data bases in different languages with ontology terms Focus on development of best practices for digitalization of legacy data

AgriSemantics

Next steps Deliver more capacity development activities Online and face-to-face: advocacy Move forward the results of the forums Objective to consolidate efforts to promote open access and open data rising capacity to share research information and data globally in agriculture and related sciences RDA/IGAD, COAR, GODAN…

Thank you