1. 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

2. 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

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

4. 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

5. Challenges?

6. 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.

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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)

11. Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)

12. 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

13. 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,  Nancy Pontika; Petr Knoth; Matteo Cancellieri; Samuel Pearce (2015). "Fostering Open Science to Research using a Taxonomy and an eLearning Portal".
Myself

16. Wheat Data Interoperability WG

17. 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

18. AgriSemantics

19. 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…

20. Thank you