International Agriculture Information Sources: Selected resources

Information about Agriculture

International information sources

FAOSTAT
FAOSTAT provides time-series records covering 210 countries and territories and international statistics concerning: Production, Trade, Food Balance Sheets Fertilizer and Pesticides, Land Use and Irrigation, Forest Products, Fishery Products, Population, Agricultural Machinery and Food Aid Shipments.
OECD iLibrary
OECD iLibrary indexes citations, abstracts, and full-text journal articles, reports, and ebooks in all areas of world economics. Full text available in HTML and PDF, plus statistics in Excel. Our subscription includes six journals, though many content areas are freely available to any site visitor, such as the OECD Factbook, Working Papers, OECD Key Tables, and more. We do not subscribe to the entire contents of this database. 1997-present.
OECD iLibrary is OECD’s Online Library for Books, Papers and Statistics and the gateway to OECD’s analysis and data. It replaces SourceOECD, and hosts all content so users can find - and cite - tables and databases as easily as articles or chapters.

OECD iLibrary contains all the publications and datasets released by OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), International Energy Agency (IEA), Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), OECD Development Centre, PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), and International Transport Forum (ITF) since 1998 - currently (October 2010) 1,000 journal issues, 2,900 working papers, 2,500 multi-lingual summaries, 6,200 e-book titles, 14,000 tables and graphs, 21,000 chapters and articles, and 390 complete databases with more than 4 billion data points.

While OECD iLibrary is a subscription-based service (Virginia Tech's subscription includes six publications) and requires proper access to some full-text titles, many content areas are freely available to any site visitor, such as the OECD Factbook, Working Papers, OECD Key Tables, and more.
World Bank Group Databases
The World Bank provides full-text journals in HTML and PDF, plus downloadable data sets on world finance, development, demographics, and other economic issues.
The World Bank's Open Data initiative is intended to provide all users with access to World Bank data. The data catalog is a listing of available World Bank datasets, include databases, pre-formatted tables and reports. Each of the listings includes a description of the data set and a direct link to that set. Where possible, the databases are linked directly to a selection screen to allow users to select the countries, indicators, and years they would like to search. Those search results can be exported in different formats. Users can also choose to download the entire database directly from the catalog.
IMF eLibrary Data
The IMF provides current data needed in the analysis of problems of international payments and of inflation and deflation, i.e., data on exchange rates, international liquidity, international banking, money and banking, interest rates, prices, production, international transactions, government accounts, and national accounts. Data presented as HTML, PDF, and Excel tables.
To access IMF data series online from January 2015, please create a personal account on the IMF site. Sign in at the 'My Data' section to retrieve data by clicking on the green ‘More’ button under ‘My Data’ and selecting ‘Downloads’ on the left side. An email notification is also sent when downloaded data are ready.

FAO Publication Repository

You can search across the FAO's thousands of publications and freely download PDFs.

U.S. government & public policy

U.S. Government Information
GovInfo provides free access to federal government publications. It indexes the full text (in HTML and PDF) of congressional, executive departments and agencies, and Supreme Court documents. 1907-present.

Science.gov gateway

Search over 60 databases and over 2,200 scientific websites to locate and access to more than 200 million pages of authoritative federal science information including research and development results.

Open databases with Open content

PubMed Central
PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).
PubAg from the USDA
PubAg covers all of the core topics of the agricultural sciences including nutrition, food safety, food quality, animal and crop production and protection, natural resources, sustainable agricultural systems, rural development, agricultural economic and policy issues, agricultural imports and exports, agricultural statistics, extramural research, and Extension education.

PLANTS Database
The PLANTS Database provides standardized information about the vascular plants, mosses, liverworts, hornworts, and lichens of the U.S. and its territories. Fact Sheets provide brief descriptions of a plant, its uses, and cultural recommendations. Plant Guides are similar but more extensive. Both are provided as PDFs. The database also includes an image gallery of photos and line drawings of U.S. plants plus cultivated or foreign taxa.
Biodiversity Heritage Library
BHL contains scanned, historic, biological literature from major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions: books, journals, and more. Content can be downloaded as PDF, ASCII, or just the images contained within the object. 1480-present.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life, is a consortium of 12 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions organized to digitize, serve, and preserve the legacy literature of biodiversity. Prior to digitization, the resources housed within each BHL institution have existed in isolation, available only to those with physical access to the collections. These collections are of exceptional value because the domain of systematic biology depends – more than any other science – upon historic literature. Consequently, the relative isolation of these collections presented an antiquated obstacle to further biodiversity investigation. This problem is particularly acute for the developing countries that are home to the majority of the world’s biodiversity.

Open Access Journals

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
- This link opens in a new window
A one stop shop for Open Access Journals (journals with a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access). Journals must exercise peer-review or editorial quality control to be included. All subject areas are covered. Uses can search by journal title or browse titles. No searching of contents of journals is provided. Journals listed in the DOAJ will also be listed in our Journal Title Database.

Hindawi Open Access Journals

Hindawi publishes peer-reviewed, Open Access journals across many areas of science, technology, and medicine, as well as several areas of social science. Hindawi’s journals are indexed in the leading abstracting and indexing databases, including the Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, INSPEC, Mathematical Reviews, and Chemical Abstracts.

Scientific Research (SCIRP)

SCIRP publishes over 200 open access, online, peer-reviewed journals over a wide range of disciplines including Biomedical & Life Sciences, Earth & Environmental Sciences, Medicine & Healthcare to name a few.

Digital Libraries, Open repositories, and Other guides

AGORA

Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA). The AGORA programme, set up by the FAO together with major publishers, enables developing countries to gain access to an outstanding digital library collection in the fields of food, agriculture, environmental science and related social sciences. You will need to check the different sites listed from their page for eligibility and creation of accounts to access.

Directory of Open Access Repositories - OpenDOAR

OpenDOAR is the quality-assured global directory of academic open access repositories. It enables the identification, browsing and search for repositories, based on a range of features, such as location, software or type of material held

IFPRI

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries. Established in 1975, IFPRI currently has more than 600 employees working in over 50 countries. It is a research center of CGIAR, a worldwide partnership engaged in agricultural research for development.

GRAIN resources

This guide supports the Grain Research and Innovation (GRAIN) project in Afghanistan, a project of Michigan State University’s (MSU) Global Center for Food Systems Innovation

Virginia Tech Institutional Repository

VTechWorks
VTechWorks is Virginia Tech's institutional repository. It contains born-digital and scanned publications of Virginia Tech faculty and students, like dissertations, plus documents like Virginia state publication. Most are available in full text (PDF and other formats) and have no restrictions on access.
Virginia Tech's open access institutional repository, publicizes and preserves the scholarly work of Virginia Tech faculty, students, and staff: journal articles, books, theses, dissertations, conference papers, slide presentations, technical reports, working papers, administrative documents, videos, images, and more. Most content is recent, published within the last 15 years, but there is also a great deal of older and historical content. The full text of all documents is available, often in PDF format, and all entries are indexed by search engines such as Google Scholar and Discovery Search. Any member of the Virginia Tech community can upload material to VTechWorks.
How VTechWorks benefits researchers

Research in VTechWorks is widely disseminated, free to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.
Research in VTechWorks is easily discovered, since it is indexed in Google Scholar, WorldCat, the Virginia Tech website, and the Library's Discovery.
Research in VTechWorks has increased impact: many studies show that openly accessible research is more frequently cited by journalists and scholars than research published in journals and books that must be paid for.
Research in VTechWorks has a persistent, stable link ("handle") that won't change even when current servers are replaced, which makes it more reliable for others to cite and to share on social media.
Research in VTechWorks will be preserved by the University Libraries for decades or even centuries, unlike research posted on a personal web page or published by a company that might go out of business.
Research in VTechWorks is preserved even if a researcher leaves Virginia Tech, but it can always be posted or published elsewhere, since Virginia Tech does not claim any unnecessary or additional rights to the material.

Open Textbooks

The following links provide lists and information to openly available textbooks in the listed subject area (additional disciplines can be found at: https://guides.lib.vt.edu/oer/subjects)

Other Open Resources related to Life Sciences

Merck Veterinary Manual

Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ, USA is a global healthcare leader working to help the world be well. From developing new therapies that treat and prevent disease to helping people in need, they are committed to improving health and well-being around the world.

FAO's State of the World's Forests

This report by the Food and Agricultural Organization provides a snapshot of the current state of forests and forest production worldwide. The most recent report available was published in 2018.

Locating Open Images

Some images may use a Creative Commons (CC) license (Attribution required)

Search via Creative Commons
Search via Google Advanced Images Search (scroll down to "Rights" and use drop down menu to filtering by type of license)
Examples of open, CC-based image repositories include

Some images are available in the Public Domain (Attribution highly recommended)

Prints & Photographs Online Catalog from the Library of Congress
publicdomainpictures.net

Contact Person

Inga Haugen

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Subjects: Agriculture, biological sciences, and natural resources