AGRIS and the Network

AGRIS, the international information system for agricultural sciences and technology, is a free database that collects bibliographic information from around the world on scientific, technical and socioeconomic publications on a wide variety of topics related to food and agriculture. AGRIS is composed of two elements: the AGRIS Network and the database itself.

The AGRIS Network is a community of organizations that contribute to AGRIS by providing metadata (bibliographic records) and/or support knowledge sharing activities among the network members.

Organizations that produce and/or collect and disseminate information relating to FAO’s thematic areas of work through their digital libraries, repositories or journal publishing platforms can become part of the AGRIS Network by providing AGRIS with their bibliographic records.

By contributing to AGRIS, organizations benefit from being part of a dynamic international network with a focus on agricultural content that is accessible, intensively used and massively distributed in the global information landscape. More specifically, being indexed in AGRIS increases visibility of the organizations at the global level; increases usage of institutional research outputs; enables discoverability on the web; offers multilinguality via AGROVOC, the multilingual thesaurus; creates knowledge sharing networks; and creates opportunities for further collaboration.

Data providers are organizations that contribute to the content of AGRIS by submitting metadata (bibliographic records) or by exposing metadata through OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) endpoints. Data providers are encouraged to work closely with country hubs (see question 8).

The list and the map of current data providers can be found in the AGRIS Data Provider Registry.

Types of data providers include research centres, academic institutions, publishers, governmental bodies, development programmes, as well as international and national organizations.

Country hubs, formerly known as National AGRIS Centres, are organizations that act as focal points for AGRIS at country or regional level. 

Country hubs act as focal points for AGRIS at country or regional level and are responsible for promoting AGRIS, guiding eligible partners on joining the AGRIS Network, advising existing and potential organizations on submitting information about their resources (metadata), and coordinating capacity development activities in collaboration with FAO headquarters.

An organization interested in becoming part of the AGRIS Network can register as a data provider by filling this online form. Before filling the registration form, applicants must check that:

• The organization is not already registered in the AGRIS Data Provider Registry.
• Thematic areas of work of the organization are related to at least one of FAO's thematic areas of work.
• The application will be made on behalf of the organization. Individual departments or journals cannot apply.
• Data from the applying organization is not already available in AGRIS through aggregators, such as  the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Scielo or AGRICOLA.
• The metadata to be submitted is compliant with the metadata submission requirements. 

Please send your queries about the database, the Network or any other topics relevant to AGRIS services to [email protected].