Agriculture Business Week

IRRI books move from dusty shelves to the virtual library. Need a book? Google it.

From its huge volume of research results on rice and rice-related subject matter, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) has, for nearly 50 years, generated and disseminated knowledge and technology as public goods to rice farmers via its partners in the developing and developed world.

Since 1962 (when IRRI began publishing), the Institute has produced some 500 scientific titles encompassing around 100,000 printed pages, in the form of monographs, workshop proceedings, field guides, and manuals. “These books have always been distributed for free or at minimal cost to our partners in the developing countries primarily through their institutional libraries,” says Gene Hettel, head of IRRI’s Communication and Publications Services (CPS). “Many titles are published solely by IRRI; some are co-published with reputable science publishers, such as World Scientific, Elsevier, Wiley, Kluwer, CABI, and others.”

For a time during the 1980s into the 1990s, IRRI was undoubtedly the largest publisher of scientific books in the Philippines, according to Tom Hargrove, CPS head during those days and most recently coordinator of the Information and Communications Unit at the International (enter for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development in Muscle, Shoals, Alabama, USA. “We published 18 to 25 books annually back then,” he says. “By 1990, at least 130 editions of 33 books (particularly field guides and manuals) had been published by collaborating publishers in 29 countries and in 42 languages. The linchpin among these, A Farmer’s Primer on Growing Rice (42 languages including 10 Philippine dialects), was easily the world’s most widely published agricultural book.”
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A popular field guide in this impressive family of extension-type publications, Friends of the Rice Farmer: Helpful- Insects, Spiders, and Pathogens, just has its tenth printing in English in March 2009, thrusting the total number of copies past the 100,000 mark when adding 25 non-English editions in Khmer, Burmese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Tamil, Nepali, and others.

Although the number of IRRI-produced titles has tapered off somewhat in recent years due to declines in scientific staff and budget reductions, the Institute has still produced more than 180 significant monographs, manuals, reports, and proceedings since 1995 including such recent titles as Economic Costs of Drought and Rice Farmers’ Coping Mechanisms, Water Management in Irrigated Rice: Coping with Water Scarcity, Technologies for Improving Rural Livelihoods in Rainfed Systems in South Asia, and Direct Seeding of Rice and Weed Management for the Rice-Wheat System of the Indo-Gangetic Plains.

Mr. Hettel has observed some changes in IRRI’s science publishing scenario since he became CPS head in 1997. “Back then,” he says, “when determining the pressrun for a book, it often exceeded 1,000 copies and we had just started to consider occasionally producing a digital version for placing on a CD or on the Web. Today, we rarely print 1,000 hard copies (because of the now routine digital alternatives) and, while a digital version is a given, we have begun asking the question, `Do we need to print any hard copies at all`?”‘

According to Mr. Hettel, since January 2008, CPS, with the help of IRRI’s Information Technology Services (ITS), has been posting most of its new books on Google Book Search (GBS). This involves’ a special presence for IRRI on the facility even with its own URL: http://books.irri.org. “The new books join nearly 300 historic titles from the Institute’s rich publishing history,” he says. “Envisioning a time when it would be fundamental to have our scientific books – current and historic – available digitally via our own Web site, we began scanning titles in our archives in 2000. This was a slow process because we were scanning at a high resolution (300 dots per inch) and doing optical character recognition (OCR) at 99%- accuracy. This process started long before there was a GBS, but just as we finished a critical mass of the project, there GBS was — online and ready for the ‘perfect marriage.”‘

According to Erik Hartmann, head of GBS Strategic Partnership Development for Southeast Asia, IRRI’s presence on Google was a collaborative effort in which a “co-branded book search” site was set up. “This basically means using a GBS back-end to provide a custom user-interface for a single publisher, so the search results are restricted to that single publisher’s books and the appearance is designed to match the look and feel of the publisher’s own Web site,” says Mr. Hartmann. “In IRRI’s case, they designed a very beautiful background image and they built a page on their own Web site, which allows users to download book PDFs from their site. This page is dynamic, receiving an ISBN, which is passed from the GBS page and then redirects the user to the appropriate PDF download.”

Mr. Hartmann points out that the IRK Web team did some really nice extra touches, which he thinks helps make this site so successful. “IRRI made all their copyrighted titles 100% viewable and searchable on GBS rather than the default 20%,” he says. “And, IRRI changed the text of their `Buy this Book’ link on GBS to “Free PDF download.’ The exciting thing about this change is that the rate at which people click the `Buy this Book’ link shot up overnight. Previously, about one in 100 people would click that link, but, after the change, the click-through rate shot up to more than 10%, which is higher than any publisher we have ever worked with. IRRI was the first publisher on GBS offering PDF downloads of its books and has led the way for other centers in the Consultative Group on-International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) to follow suit.”

“We are elated over the public’s response to IRRI books on GBS,” says Mr. Hettel. “Since January 2008 when our books went online at GBS, Google Analytic has recorded more than 200,000 book visits, and more than 15,000 PDF downloads.”

This collaboration with Google goes hand-in-hand with IRRI’s new copyright policy announced by the Institute’s Board of Trustees after its September 2006 meeting, which, in part, reads, “IRRI will release its information products (software, documents, multimedia, data), as much as possible, under a suitable open content license. Such license shall allow copying, distribution, and (usually) the creation of derivative products; prohibit commercialization; and require atiribution as well as the release of derivative products under the same license as the original product was released by IRRI, hence, some rights reserved.”

The new Creative Commons (CC) policy, which covers Rice Today as well as spelled out at the bottom of the contents page, doesn’t really change IRRI’s longstanding policy of always granting permission to use its information products for non-commercial purposes’ “This new policy simply bypasses the `permission requirement’ altogether and clarifies and enhances the Institute’s intention where sharing of information is concerned,” says Mr. Hettel.

In addition to placing books on GBS, IRRI has embraced this policy by placing this same CC statement on its Web site (http://irri.org) and featuring some 4,500 images on the public photo management facility, flickr (www.flickr.com/ photos/ricephotos), and some 60 videos and counting on YouTube (www.youtube.com/irrivideo), which compositely have had some 75,000 views.

According to Marco van den Berg, ITS manager, the digital distribution of IRRI information and photos achieved via GBS and flickr gives access to audiences that have been difficult to reach using traditional methods, for a variety of reasons. “Among the top 25 countries that have downloaded books from our co-branded GBS site are Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri- Lanka, and Myanmar,” he says.

Anyone can now obtain, repurpose, distribute, and even modify the content (self-service publishing) of 1RRI publications, photos, and videos with proper attribution using CC licenses.

However, IRRI’s CC policy has presented the CPS staff with some new challenges when they deal with science publishers looking to co-publish some of IRRI’s books, most of whom still request exclusive publication rights if not downright copyright assignment.

According to Bill Hardy, IRRI senior science editor and publisher, some conflicts with potential co-publishers that are not on the CC bandwagon include the outside publisher’s interest in having hardcopy commercial sales and a perpetual license. IRRI, on the other hand, has primary interests in delivering global public goods and providing free online access to its communication products. “Even so,” says Dr. Hardy, “IRRI is tackling these issues by drafting some creative contractual arrangements and compromises with some flexible co publishers, such as World Scientific in Singapore, with which IRRI has recently co-published Rice Genetics V, Charting New Pathways to C4 Rice, and Drought Frontiers in Rice.

There is a lot of interest in the publishing world in how institutions such as IRRI are adopting CC and dealing with publishers who still prefer “all rights reserved.” In February and March 2009, Mr. Hettel gave presentations on Adopting and Utilizing Creative Commons to Facilitate the Dissemination of Rice Knowledge and Technology at the Regional Conference on Creative Commons in Manila and the Symposium on Common Use Licensing of Publicly Furlded Scientific Data and Publications on Taipei, respectively.

According to Internet World Status, as of 31 December 2008, only 17.2% of Asia’s population and 5.6% of Africa’s use the Internet. “Because so many of our clients on these continents are not yet wired to the Internet,” says Dr. Hardy, “traditional book production will be in IRRI’s future for some time to come, albeit in a much smaller volume. We will continue to distribute traditional books to our nearly 300 institutional depository libraries and to others around the world indicating a need. When we recently liquidated the inventory in our closed-down book storage facility on the IRRI campus, we made special efforts to distribute these books to needy libraries instead of shredding them.”

So, some may wonder, which IRRI book is, so far, the most popular among the more than 200,00 book visits and 2.5 million page views on GBS? Might it be about the latest on water management, coping with drought, or direct seeding of rice?

“None of those” says Mr. Hettel, “although there is certainly interest in these important topics to be sure. With just over 5,600 book visits and more than 71,500 page views, Small Farm Equipment for Developing Countries, a 22-year-old out-of-print proceedings of a conference of the same name held at IRRI headquarters in September 1985, wins the prize! This just goes to show that newly digitized titles, which have not ’seen the light of day’ for years in their traditional format, can still have value and useful information to reveal – all thanks to the digital age.”

By Henry Sackville Hamilton