The FAO AGRIS, managed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), continues to play a central role in advancing global access to agricultural knowledge.

Since its establishment in the 1970s, FAO AGRIS has evolved from a paper-based indexing system into a digital, open-access infrastructure that now houses over 16 million structured bibliographic records in 123 languages. This transformation has made FAO AGRIS one of the most multilingual and inclusive platforms for agricultural research, offering critical resources to users around the world, from policymakers to farmers and students.

A major milestone in FAO AGRIS’s trajectory was its designation as a Digital Public Good (DPG) by the Digital Public Goods Alliance in 2024. This recognition affirms its adherence to open data and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles while acknowledging its contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals. In line with its open science mandate, FAO AGRIS continues to expand its network of over 2,000 data providers and strengthen its technical architecture to ensure seamless access and interoperability.

Among the latest enhancements, the implementation of a clustering feature now allows FAO AGRIS to group multiple metadata records referring to the same publication into a single, consolidated result. This update significantly improves search efficiency and reduces duplication while preserving the original records. FAO AGRIS has also expanded its multilingual capacity, enabling access to local knowledge systems and ensuring equitable knowledge sharing across language barriers.

The platform’s technical backbone has been strengthened through support for XML archival, JSON indexing, and persistent URLs for data providers, facilitating repository integration and increasing institutional visibility. With a focus on underrepresented regions, FAO AGRIS continues onboarding new providers from Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, supported by its HelpDesk, online courses, and webinars. Integration with AGROVOC—FAO’s multilingual agricultural thesaurus—enhances thematic categorization and semantic search, while its metadata harvesting via OAI-PMH supports a range of formats suited to varying institutional capacities.

FAO AGRIS is a flagship of FAO’s commitment to inclusive, open science. Continuously improved and supported by an expanding global network, it remains a cornerstone for sharing agricultural research and a trusted resource for evidence-based decision making worldwide.