Agriculture is the backbone of African economies and food security. This guide gathers free, open-access (OA) journals, open textbooks (OER), data and tools across crop science, animal & veterinary science, botany, forestry and food science & nutrition.
Subdisciplines — jump in
- Crop & Soil Science (search FRELIP) · Agriculture OER course
- Animal & Veterinary Science (search FRELIP) · Agriculture OER course
- Plant Science & Botany (search FRELIP) · Agriculture OER course
- Forestry & Agroforestry (search FRELIP) · Agriculture OER course
- Food Science & Nutrition (search FRELIP) · Agriculture OER course
New here? Start with these courses
- Agriculture OER (this subject)
- 15 — Navigating Research Guides
- 16 — Accessing Open Access Journals
- 14 — Using VuFind Discovery Search
Search everything
search.frelip.org — one search across journals, books, theses and data harvested into FRELIP.
Authoritative free reference works for definitions, terminology and quick facts across agriculture.
General agriculture
- FAOSTAT (UN FAO global food & agriculture statistics)
- FAOTERM (multilingual FAO terminology database)
- AGROVOC (FAO multilingual agricultural thesaurus)
- Wikipedia: Outline of Agriculture (overview & entry points)
Crop & Soil Science
- SSSA Glossary of Soil Science Terms (Soil Science Society of America)
- FAO Global Soil Partnership / Soils Portal (concepts & resources)
Animal & Veterinary Science
- Merck Veterinary Manual (free comprehensive veterinary reference)
- WOAH Terrestrial Manual (World Org. for Animal Health standards)
Plant Science & Botany
- Plants of the World Online (Kew) (global plant names & data)
- World Flora Online (authoritative plant taxonomy)
Forestry & Food Science
- FAO Forestry (terminology, State of the World's Forests)
- USDA FoodData Central (food composition reference)
Free, openly licensed books and textbooks you can read, download and reuse.
OA book platforms (search by subject)
- DOAB — Directory of Open Access Books (agriculture search)
- OAPEN Library (peer-reviewed OA monographs)
- Open Library / Internet Archive (agriculture subject)
- OER Commons — Agriculture (open educational resources)
- Open Textbook Library — Agriculture
Open textbooks & LibreTexts
- Biology LibreTexts (botany, plant biology, genetics)
- Chemistry LibreTexts (soil & food chemistry)
- Medicine LibreTexts (nutrition & veterinary basics)
- OpenStax Biology 2e (free plant & animal biology textbook)
- OpenStax Microbiology (food & soil microbiology)
Crop, animal, forestry & food texts
- DOAB — Crop Production (OA books)
- DOAB — Veterinary Science (OA books)
- DOAB — Forestry & Agroforestry (OA books)
- DOAB — Food Science & Nutrition (OA books)
Peer-reviewed OA journals and preprint servers. Always check rights via DOAJ.
Crop & Soil Science
- DOAJ — Agronomy & Crop journals
- SOIL (Copernicus/EGU) (OA soil science journal)
- Frontiers in Agronomy (OA)
Animal & Veterinary Science
Plant Science & Botany
Forestry & Food Science
- Frontiers in Forests & Global Change (OA)
- Forests (MDPI) (OA)
- Frontiers in Nutrition (OA)
- PLOS (PLOS ONE / Climate publish food & ag research)
African scholarship
Search engines and indexes to discover OA literature and trace citations.
Discovery & bibliographic
- BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine — agriculture)
- CORE (world's largest OA full-text aggregator)
- OpenAIRE Explore (EU OA research graph)
- OpenAlex (open scholarly index, 250M+ works)
- Semantic Scholar (AI-powered literature search)
- The Lens (scholarly & patent search)
Citation indexes
- OpenCitations (open citation data)
- Dimensions (free publication & citation discovery)
Subject-specific
- AGRIS (FAO) (international agricultural science index)
- CABI Digital Library (agriculture & applied life sciences)
- PubMed (veterinary, nutrition & food biomedicine)
Open datasets, repositories and primary statistics for agricultural research.
General repositories
- Zenodo (CERN open data & software)
- Dryad (curated research data)
- Figshare (figures, datasets, outputs)
- OSF (Open Science Framework projects & data)
- re3data (registry of research data repositories)
Subject-specific data
- FAOSTAT Data (crops, livestock, forestry, food balances)
- Genesys (global plant genetic resources / genebanks)
- GBIF (biodiversity & plant occurrence data)
- SoilGrids (ISRIC) (global soil property maps)
- World Bank Microdata — Agriculture
Openly licensed images, lectures, courses and maps for teaching and learning.
Images & media
- Wikimedia Commons — Agriculture (free images)
- Biodiversity Heritage Library (digitized botanical & zoological works)
- CGIAR / CCAFS on Flickr (CC-licensed African ag photos)
Video & courseware
- MIT OpenCourseWare (free courses)
- Khan Academy — Biology (plant & cell biology)
- FAO elearning Academy (free agriculture & food courses)
- FAO YouTube (documentaries & explainers)
Maps & tools
- Global Forest Watch (interactive forest & land-use maps)
- FEWS NET / USGS (food security & cropland mapping)
Free tools to manage references, find full text, get an author ID, and analyze data.
Reference managers
- Zotero (free, open-source reference manager)
- JabRef (open-source BibTeX manager)
- ZoteroBib (quick one-off bibliographies)
Identity & find full text
- ORCID (persistent researcher identifier)
- Unpaywall (browser extension for legal OA copies)
- CORE Discovery (one-click access to OA full text)
Analysis & writing
- R (statistics for agronomy & field trials)
- QGIS (free GIS for soil, land & forestry mapping)
- GNU Octave (open numerical computing)
Understand licences, where to deposit, funder mandates and accessibility standards.
Licensing
- Creative Commons (licence overview)
- CC Licence Chooser (pick the right licence)
Repository & self-archiving policy
- Sherpa Romeo (publisher OA / self-archiving policies)
- OpenDOAR (directory of OA repositories)
- ROAR (registry of open access repositories)
Funder mandates & assessment
- Plan S / cOAlition S (OA funder mandate)
- DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment)
Metadata & accessibility
- Dublin Core (metadata terms)
- WCAG (web content accessibility guidelines)
Connect with the agricultural research community and keep building your skills.
Learned societies & associations
- African Association of Agricultural Economists (AAAE)
- AU-IBAR (African Union — animal resources)
- FARA (Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa)
- Crop Science Society of America
- IUFRO (International Union of Forest Research Organizations)
- Institute of Food Science & Technology