FAO’s role
FAO
promotes the exchange of scientific research and technical knowledge
related to all aspects of food and agriculture. Through a range of
knowledge programmes, FAO helps to increase the accessibility and
visibility of research products in its Member Countries, and to ensure
that this information is available, accessible, and usable worldwide.
These programmes aim to:
- Promote accessibility of scientific information and digital data in food & agriculture.
- Strengthen engagement of international, regional and national organizations in scaling up access to and dissemination of agricultural data.
- Improve the quality and effectiveness of agricultural research and education.
This exchange of knowledge and information not only supports FAO’s work for a world free of hunger, malnutrition and poverty, but also contributes to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Initiatives
FAO makes scientific information and data on food and agriculture widely available and accessible through the following platforms:
FAO AGRIS is the leading global repository for agricultural science and technology, trusted by millions of users worldwide. Open to all and accessible through a user-friendly search interface, it provides free access to millions of bibliographic records in more than 250 languages, contributed by over 2,000 data providers, with millions linking directly to full-text publications.
Its extensive multilingual coverage ensures that FAO AGRIS serves a wide range of users— including government officials, researchers, lecturers, graduate students, librarians, practitioners, publishers, professional associations, and policymakers— making agricultural knowledge more inclusive and accessible across languages.
FAO AGRIS is also an international network of data providers, bringing together research institutions, development programmes, and international and national organizations, government bodies, libraries, and publishers that supply bibliographic records about food and agricultural science publications.
FAO AGRIS's certification as a Digital Public Good (DPG) highlights its central role in advancing sustainable agrifood systems and confirms that it meets rigorous standards of openness, interoperability, and alignment with the FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).
Subscription-based journals remain an important source of high-quality scientific information to advance higher education, improve the work of development practitioners and inform public policy decisions. Since 2003, FAO has led AGORA, a knowledge platform that provides free or low-cost access to major scientific journals and books in food and agriculture to public institutions in low- and middle-income countries. Staff and students from eligible institutions, including universities and colleges, research institutes, agricultural extension centers, government offices and libraries, receive access to the journals for free or at greatly reduced rates. AGORA is one of the five programmes of Research4Life.
Most of the world’s leading scientific journal publishers participate in the programme, and partners include more than 125 of the world’s leading scientific publishers, WHO, FAO, UNEP, WIPO, ILO, Cornell and Yale University Libraries, STM and other technical partners.
FAO supports stronger knowledge sharing and better knowledge access among its Member Countries through the publication of AGROVOC: a controlled vocabulary and multilingual thesaurus covering all FAO’s areas of interest. AGROVOC is coordinated by FAO and is currently maintained by the AGROVOC Editorial network. This includes over 34 organizations and communities of experts who volunteer as focal points for specific languages and/or specific domains within areas related to food, agriculture and fisheries.
AGROVOC is a multilingual comprehensive agricultural thesaurus available online in more than 42 languages. It is a global vocabulary that is used to facilitate interoperability by enhancing the accessibility and visibility of information and data.
Standardization matters: using AGROVOC concepts to tag scientific publications (journal articles, conference proceedings, dissertations, etc.) can help researchers around the world to find and discover scientific literature easily. An important part of the food and agricultural research production is not published in English, and thus may not be easily discoverable. Using AGROVOC to tag resources can facilitate the search of topics, allowing searches in a specific language and providing results in many others, strengthening visibility worldwide.
KnowledgeLab offers an environment to support the knowledge platforms which currently includes FAO AGRIS, AGROVOC and AGORA programmes. Through these knowledge programmes, FAO helps to increase the accessibility and visibility of research products related to food and agriculture, and to make this information available, accessible and usable worldwide. Additionally, KnowledgeLab facilitates capacity development activities to communities of practice like the Agricultural Information Management Standards Portal (AIMS). KnowledgeLab targets existing stakeholders that use and contribute to the knowledge platforms by providing tailored online training activities. These courses are designed and announced in the communication channels of the relevant programmes, and participation is upon registration based on the defined criteria.
AIMS is a worldwide community of experts in food and agricultural information and data management facilitated by FAO. The knowledge sharing platform provides a space for members to reach out and share projects, best practices, learning opportunities, events and new ideas. It also keeps community members up to date on relevant news, events and stakeholder updates through newsletters, interviews with AIMS community members, publications and free webinars. The AIMS community encompasses different types of professionals related to food and agricultural information and data management such as technicians, librarians, data managers, information management specialists, policy makers and semantic experts. Anyone interested in being involved in the community can register at http://aims.fao.org/user/register.
Communities of Practice
Join the conversation
In numbers:
AGORA provides access to up to 40,000 leading journals and books in the fields of health, agriculture, environment, and applied sciences
More than 12,000 institutions in more than 120 low- and middle-income countries benefit from free or low-cost online access through AGORA
FAO AGRIS provides free access to more than 16 million records in over 250 different languages
More than 2,000 institutions including research centers, academic institutions, publishers, governmental bodies, development programmes, international and national organizations from over 165 countries currently contribute to FAO AGRIS
AGROVOC consists of more than 42,000 concepts and more than 1 million terms in up to 42 languages
AIMS is a worldwide community of more than 5,500 experts in food and agricultural information and data management
Highlighted publications:
Access the Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA) User guide here
Access the Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA) Brochure here.
This brochure presents AGROVOC, a controlled vocabulary and thesaurus which covers all areas of FAO’s work, helps to standardize such data and make it more easily discoverable.
This course is tailored to cater to the needs of both individuals and institutions and is offered entirely free of charge in English.
This guide aims to inform the FAO AGRIS community, in particular the data providers, on all aspects of engaging with FAO AGRIS, from joining the FAO AGRIS Network to contributing the data efficiently to the database.
This guide aims to update the FAO AGRIS community, in particular those who use the FAO AGRIS database to find scientific literature on food and agriculture, about the best ways to engage with and search the database.