Ministry of Agriculture Funds Open Access Projects

Here's an update on the pilot project I posted earlier this year. The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture Food and Rural Affairs has decided to fund two open access projects for research. One of the projects is led by Professor Helen Hambly at the University of Guelph and I will be working with her and the OMAFRA Veg Crop Specialist Janice LeBoeuf. We will be reviewing the issues behind publishing research reports on applied topics like veg crops. Our focus will be to recommend how the researchers in this area can make the reports they create public and freely accessible on the Internet.

Tanzania and Civil Society

The University Librarian as a Team Player in Civil Society
This article talks about the progress of my research team working with the Academic Library in the capital and a small rural community in Northern Tanzania.

Open Access for Agriculture Research in Ontario

I have the pleasure of working on the same campus as a lot of agricultural researchers who do a lot of work with farmers and producer groups promoting new ideas.

Janice LeBoeuf is a Vegetable Crop Specialist for the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture. She uses research reports to solve problems in the field. She came across the problem that there is no place online to find research solutions for Ontario farmers.

When she asked me if I knew how to solve this problem we decided to get to work on making an online space for sharing reports. Her summer students scanned over 400 reports, she developed the keywords and got licences signed for each report to allow for publication.

I asked the Guelph Library for space to store the electronic files and we created the Ontario Vegetable Crop Research Collection. This is a pilot project and we are waiting for funds to move more reports online. You can check it out now: http://dspace.lib.uoguelph.ca/xmlui/handle/10214/1668