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The purpose of this paper is to explore addressing the accessibility, availability and interoperability issues of exchanging agricultural research output by means of the AGRIS application profile – an exchange metadata standard – and controlled vocabularies or subject‐specific knowledge organisation systems.

Based on an analysis of the open access (OA) publishing model and the open archives initiative (OAI), the authors share their proposal for the architecture for open archive networks in agricultural sciences and technology.

The lack of adequate information exchange possibilities between researchers in food and agricultural sciences represents a significant weakness, limiting the research system to properly help address the issues of agricultural development. The OA publishing model promotes the availability of content online, including grey literature, which is not available through commercial distribution channels but which significantly contributes to agricultural research and development. The new architecture proposed in this paper is based on these OA and OAI paradigms and has three components: the creation of content with agreed content description standards, the harvesting of the content using common exchange standards and the value‐added services provided to the users using the exchanged standard content.

The paper presents how the agricultural sciences and technology community can adopt the OA model and OAI tools. The paper will be useful to information professionals who are planning to improve the accessibility and interoperability of the agricultural research produced in their institution by the creation of institutional repositories.

Profiles, in the first of a series, more recently established Open Archives Initiative (OAI) data providers whose content is not only “harvestable” by OAI service providers, and which offer open access to institutional and discipline information resources in a wide variety of publication and media formats. Looks at the Digital Library of the Commons; E‐LIS: E‐prints in Library and Information Science; INFOMINE; and the Open Video Project.

Large terminologies usually contain a mix of terms that are either generic or domain specific, which makes the use of the terminology itself a difficult task that may limit the positive effects of these systems. The purpose of this paper is to systematically evaluate the degree of domain specificity of the AGROVOC controlled vocabulary terms as a representative of a large terminology in the agricultural domain and discuss the generic/specific boundaries across its hierarchy.

A user-oriented study with domain-experts in conjunction with quantitative and systematic analysis. First an in-depth analysis of AGROVOC was carried out to make a proper selection of terms for the experiment. Then domain-experts were asked to classify the terms according to their domain specificity. An evaluation was conducted to analyse the domain-experts’ results. Finally, the resulting data set was automatically compared with the terms in SUMO, an upper ontology and MILO, a mid-level ontology; to analyse the coincidences.

Results show the existence of a high number of generic terms. The motivation for several of the unclear cases is also depicted. The automatic evaluation showed that there is not a direct way to assess the specificity degree of a term by using SUMO and MILO ontologies, however, it provided additional validation of the results gathered from the domain-experts.

The “domain-analysis” concept has long been discussed and it could be addressed from different perspectives. A resume of these perspectives and an explanation of the approach followed in this experiment is included in the background section.

The authors propose an approach to identify the domain specificity of terms in large domain-specific terminologies and a criterion to measure the overall domain specificity of a knowledge organisation system, based on domain-experts analysis. The authors also provide a first insight about using automated measures to determine the degree to which a given term can be considered domain specific. The resulting data set from the domain-experts’ evaluation can be reused as a gold standard for further research about these automatic measures.

The purpose of this paper is to present E-ViVa (Ellinike Vivliothikonomike Vase), the national Hellenic fulltext database on Librarianship and Information Science, developed by the Library of the University of Cyprus. The objectives of E-ViVa are to identify, locate, gather, organize, index, digitize, preserve and promote the results of the research conducted in Greece and Cyprus in the scientific fields of Archival, Library and Information Sciences.

The paper provides data concerning the volume, the coverage, the inclusion criteria, the content, the format and the platform of the database, as well as the steps that have been followed for the development. The legal framework related with the copyright issues that are raised are also discussed.

A comparison is attempted between the coverage of E-ViVa and the relative records included in five subject-related databases: eLIS, LISA, LISTA, ISI-SSCI and SCOPUS. Finally the future plans for the project are presented.

Future plans concerning E-ViVa are based on the completeness of the database, the linguistic exploitation of the terms used through time and check of Lotka's law application concerning authors.

As the vast majority of the records and fulltext are not provided by any other organized database, E-ViVa emerges as a “must search first” for any future author of scientific paper concerning the situation on librarianship research in Greece and Cyprus. The case of E-ViVa and the methodology that was followed can be used as a pattern for developing national databases on LIS or other fields.

E-ViVa is offered as an open access database with fulltext.

E-ViVa is the only fulltext database on Librarianship and Information Science, which concentrates the related publications produced in or related to Greece and Cyprus.