IFPRI’s mission is to provide policy solutions that reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition. Among the Institute’s guiding principles is the view that its research is an international public good, that should be freely disseminated to the extent possible. This view, which is shared by CGIAR (a global agricultural research partnership of which IFPRI and 14 other international centers are members), is in alignment with the tenets of the Open Access movement: to provide free online access to intellectual outputs generated by research. IFPRI is committed to the principle of free access to the knowledge it generates.
IFPRI’s Evolution toward Open Access
IFPRI has produced international public goods since its creation in 1975. These intellectual assets consist of IFPRI publications, datasets, knowledge products, and interactive web-based tools—most of which are made freely available for personal, research, academic, and other non-commercial use. IFPRI authors also publish in external publications. While some of these external publications are freely available, others are not. The Institute has sought and will continue to seek open-access arrangements/options from commercial publishers wherever possible.
At the time of the Institute’s creation, “open access” mostly meant providing hard-copy publications free of charge to anyone who requested them. Over the years, communications technology has enhanced IFPRI’s ability to provide access to its own work. IFPRI began offering its publications online in 1995, and today its website provides access to most of IFPRI’s own publications and similar intellectual assets. In 2000, IFPRI began sharing its library catalog via the website, which at that time contained only metadata for IFPRI publications, papers published in external sources and datasets. In 2007, IFPRI joined Harvard University’s open repository for data, Dataverse, which now holds a wide range of IFPRI datasets. IFPRI’s e-brary, created in January 2012, is the institutional knowledge repository. It contains IFPRI’s open access publications and adheres to a common protocol called the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), making it easier for these publications to be visible to academic search engines and abstracting/indexing databases (such as REPEC, OAISTER, LandPortal, Economistsonline, and WorldCat). As the Linked Open Data (LOD) movement continues to gain popularity, IFPRI provides linked open data underlying IFPRI publications whenever possible.
IFPRI’s Current Open Access Practices
IFPRI adheres to the basic tenets of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, articulated in 2002 (subject to any applicable third-party rights and or confidentiality obigations). All applicable data are subject to IFPRI’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) guidelines.
Reader rights: IFPRI makes all IFPRI publications (and related datasets) freely available upon publication with no embargo period.
Reuse rights: IFPRI allows for the reuse of IFPRI-owned materials for academic purposes without restriction; commercial and other reuse requires prior written authorization.
Copyright: While IFPRI’s copyright statement asks users to contact IFPRI for permission to republish and other uses not expressly permitted, permission is generally liberally granted, subject to any relevant third-party rights. IFPRI-owned works are: “Copyright © 2013 International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). All rights reserved.” For permission to republish and other uses not expressly permitted, please contact ifpri-copyright@cgiar.org.
Author posting rights: Authors may post final versions of IFPRI publications on third-party websites, but the Institute prefers that those third-party websites link back to the relevant materials on IFPRI’s website or in IFPRI’s knowledge repositories—rather than duplicate documents. Any re-posting or linking should be careful not to state or imply any affiliation with, or endorsement or certification by IFPRI unless factual and accurate.
Automatic reposting: IFPRI posts IFPRI publications metadata in trusted third-party academic repositories (such as RePEc, OAISTER, and WorldCat) as soon as possible following publication.
Machine readability: IFPRI publications metadata, as well as the related bibliographic metadata and underlying data (including supplementary data), are provided in community machine-readable standard formats in the repository, and are made available through a community standard API OAI-PMH.