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, to be freely disseminated wherever 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—all of which are, and have always been, freely available. 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 work. IFPRI began offering its publications online in 1995, and today its website provides access to all of IFPRI’s intellectual assets. In 2000, IFPRI began sharing its library catalog via the website, which at that time contained only metadata for IFPRI publications and papers published in external sources. 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:

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 materials for academic purposes without restriction; commercial reuse requires prior written authorization.

Copyright: While IFPRI’s copyright statement asks users to contact IFPRI for permission to republish, permission is liberally granted: “International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). All rights reserved. For permission to republish, 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.

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.

IFPRI Open Access Sites for Publications, Data, Knowledge Products, and Tools