The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) has the fourth largest archive of scientific information in the country, with about 104,000 items with open and free access. Called Alice – an acronym for Embrapa’s Open Access to Scientific Information – this publishing portal has recorded 24.7 million downloads since 2011, the year it was created.
Most of these downloads (42%, equivalent to 10.3 million files downloaded) are from the United States. In second place, with 7.5 million downloads (30.5% of the total) is Brazil. According to Embrapa, there are also a large number of downloads of these files from users in Germany, China, Russia and France, as well as the United Kingdom.
Interest in these publications, which can be accessed free of charge, is formed mainly by academics and scholars. The material can be accessed through the website available at Company page.
Warehouse tracking concept of providing metadata البيانات [marcos ou pontos de referência] “By standardized protocols, this metadata is replicated at several sites,” said Embrapa Informática Agropecuária researcher Marcos Cezar Visoli. Asked why the US leads the rankings for downloads, the researcher said he believes this may be due to the fact that there is “a greater prevalence of Alice metadata on websites from North America”.
Publications Portal
In addition to this repository focused on the theoretical field, Embrapa also has a portal for publications that focus more on the practical field, useful for rural producers: Technological Information on Agriculture (Infoteca-e), where publications with technical content produced by research centers are available. Foundation, such as the Embrapa series, brochures, books, radio and television programs Prosa Rural and Dia de Campo on TV.
According to the company, the language used in Infoteca-e is “prepared for various audiences, such as rural producers, extension workers, agricultural technicians, students and teachers from rural schools, “in order to contribute to the dissemination of technologies and results generated by agricultural research.”
It has been downloaded 35 million times since 2011, 41.7% from Brazil and 39.5% from the United States. “In 2020 alone, nearly 6.5 million publications were downloaded, and by mid-2021 there were already 3 million downloads and 2.5 million queries on the digital contents of the repository,” Embrapa explained.
In total, Embrapa’s libraries have more than 165,000 digital items. Most of them are scientific technical products that have been accumulated over several years. In the assessment of the Superintendent of Information Management in the General Secretariat of the Foundation, Fabio Cordero, the archives are “a democratic way to give access to the population of Brazil and the world.”
According to Embrapa, the adoption of standardized international protocols in warehouses makes it possible for these produced materials to also integrate other international databases, such as Agris, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and Agrosavia, from Colombia.
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