In the fall of 2002, the Danish Research Centre for Organic Farming (DARCOF) established an electronic, open access archive called Organic Eprints. The archive receives papers, reports, theses, and other documents that are related to research in organic agriculture. This article is a short introduction to the background and purposes of the archive

Alrøe, Hugo Fjelsted

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Organic Eprints

1 af 4Newsletter from Danish Research Centre for OrganicFarming • March 2003 • No. 12 af 4Articles in this issueConsequenses of gm-plantsRecycling the organic wayEnergy - reduktion and productionWorkshop on organic pig production IntroducingDARCOFOrganic EprintsOpen archive for organic researchBy Hugo Fjelsted Alrøe, DARCOFIn the fall of 2002, the Danish Research Centre for Organic Farming (DARCOF) established an electronic, open access archive called Organic Eprints. The archive receives papers, reports, theses, and other documents that are related to research in organic agriculture. The documents are stored as "eprints" - full electronic versions together with publishing information, abstract, peer review status, etc. On the internet (at http://orgprints.org), one can browse the archive by subject area as well as by country, organization and project. There are also extensive search facilities. All can register as users in the archive and thereby deposit papers and subscribe to email alerts on new deposits in selected subject areas, from certain countries, etc. The archive has been established as a tool tofurther develop research in organic agriculture.The main objectives are to document theresearch effort, to facilitate the communicationof research papers and proposals, and toimprove the dissemination and impact ofresearch findings. In accordance with theseobjectives, DARCOF has decided to make all itsresearch products available in the archive.Moreover, Organic Eprints is offered as a freecommunity service by DARCOF – it is an openarchive that everyone can use. Researchers,students, and others from all countries candeposit their documents by way of the internet.The archive is based on GNU Eprints archive-creating software, Linux, Apache, and other open source software. Open source software is freely available and it can be modified and adapted to meet the needs of the archive. The Eprints software is under continuous development and it is being used in a growing number of academic archives. Among the planned developments are full text search and support for journal overlays.3 af 4As an open access archive, Organic Eprints is part of a larger movement that seeks to make research papers available in open archives. Physics is the leading discipline in this respect. More than half of all physics papers are deposited in a large eprint archive at http://arXiv.org. Here, scientific papers are typically deposited as preprints that receive comments from interested peers. Then they are submitted to a journal for peer review and finally the published version is also deposited in the archive. Organic Eprints differs from the physics archive in accepting not only scientific papers, but also articles that are directed at farmers, decision makers, consumers, etc. Open access has several purposes. Theefficiency and impact of the research can beimproved by making the research productsmore visible and earlier and easier available.And research quality can be ensured andimproved by way of better communicationbetween researchers, nationally andinternationally, and between researcher andother actors in the organic movement. Theclear intention is to give open access to all thedocuments in Organic Eprints. But for the timebeing, some scientific papers will have accessrestrictions due to copyright concerns – usuallybecause the authors have transferred all theircopyrights to the publisher. Generally, authorshave the copyrights to their own original workunless they have given up those rights, andtherefore they can normally give open accessto preprints. Registered users have access tosome of the restricted papers, and there isalways a freely available summary page ofeach eprint with abstract, publishinginformation, etc. Together with the rest of theopen access movement, the archive staff isworking on establishing an overview ofpublishers copyright policies and on changingthose policies to allow more open access. As indicated above, Organic Eprints is offered as a free community service that is open to everyone related to research in organic agriculture. The organic archive has been designed to facilitate international use and cooperation, with the aspiration to develop into a comprehensive international archive. DARCOF invites other organic research 4 af 4institutes and organizations to join us in using, managing and developing this service, so that it can serve as a vehicle for more and better international collaboration.There are different possibilities for getting involved in the Organic Eprints archive. As a first important step, organic organizations can make some kind of commitment towards making their research production available in the archive. This can be facilitated by including a list of relevant projects in the browse view and by selecting one or more "editors". Editors check the deposits by way of the internet, to ensure their relevance and data quality, and communicate with the depositors.Furthermore, more dedicated use of the archive can be facilitated by tailoring new language interfaces in addition to the present English language interface. A partnership agreement has recently been made with the Scientific Module of the new German organic internet portal, and it has been decided to make a German language interface. Another future possibility is to establish mirror sites based in other organizations, which will add a new level of security to the archive.Organic Eprints is located at http://www.orgprints.org

Open archive for organic research

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Organic Eprints