Scielo articles available to the agricultural community using OAI-PMH in AGRIS AP XML Format

This article reports a new way of getting access to SciELO full text journal articles using AGRIS AP XML format to harvest SciELO metadata and to include them into the AGRIS repository. It covers the following main steps of the work carried out: • Selecting about 43 journals with agricultural thematic from the Web site of SciELO; • Defining the methodology for harvesting; • Harvesting legacy data and then doing incremental harvesting for the new data from the selected SciELO journal articles for inclusion in the AGRIS XML repository; • Inclusion of SciELO articles and open access to them through the AGRIS search portal at http://www.fao.org/agris/search/search.do?query=%2Bcenter%3A%28XS%29 • Testing and proposals for improvement and future use of this feature. We share the methodology used, problems encountered, and the expected benefit. This work proves that semantically rich metadata for agricultural science and research publications based on the “AGRIS Application Profile” from the SciELO repository can be handled by the OAI-PMH protocol. It shows how the selected subset of metadata created with an ISIS application can be harvested through OAI-PMH protocol, which in turn allows for further creation of additional services by giving greater access and visibility to SciELO data in the new AGRIS AP format compared to the used DC format. The strategy that we adopted was to adapt BIREME’s OAI-PMH plug-in for direct generating of AGRIS AP XML from the SciELO application. The existing BIREME OAI-PMH plug-in interface was upgraded to accept and expose metadata using AGRIS AP in addition to the existing DC schema. This approach was elegant but required more time for realization and implementation by BIREME and FAO staff.