Organic Eprints is an international open access archive of electronic documents related to research in organic food and farming. The archive contains full-text papers together with bibliographic information, abstracts and other metadata. It also offers information on organisations, projects and facilities in the context of organic farming research.
Objectives
The main objectives of Organic Eprints are:
to facilitate the communication about organic research,
to improve the dissemination and impact of research findings, and
to document the research effort.
In accordance with these objectives the archive is designed to facilitate international use and cooperation.
Terminology
Organic Eprints is a constantly growing collection (an archive or repository) of electronic documents (eprints) about organic research. The archive is open access which means that the eprints are freely accessible to everyone over the internet. This also means that login is not required to search for the eprints in the Organic Eprints archive. Authors who wish to submit (also called to deposit) their documents in Organic Eprints will have to create an account. This enables them to login and deposit their own eprints. Read more...
Policy
The archive will accept published and unpublished documents such as scientific papers, theses, reports, book chapters, newspaper articles, videos, and project descriptions. The only criteria for acceptance are that the documents are relevant to research in organic agriculture and suitable for communication, and that the required metadata information is correct. All languages are supported, but an English abstract is encouraged.
The metadata (author, title, date, etc.) are freely accessible to all, and documents can be downloaded, stored and printed freely, in accordance with fair use.
However, documents may NOT be made publically available from other sources. Instead, linking to the eprint summary pages is encouraged.
Organic Eprints has been developed and operated since 2002 by the International Centre for Research in Organic Food Systems, ICROFS, (formerly Danish Research Centre for Organic Farming - DARCOF).
In 2003 the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) joined the project as its first international partner with editorial responsibilities for the German language region and responsibility for the German language version of Organic Eprints.
Additionally, Organic Eprints has national editors, currently in 26 countries, who assist in reviewing new eprints. See Contact Information.
Open access
Organic Eprints has been established to promote open access to research results. Open access means that the eprints are freely accessible to all who have access to the internet. The immediate benefits of an open access archive are several. Researchers and research institutions can document their production and make their research products available and searchable to a large audience. Read more...
Copyright
Basically, authors have the copyright to their documents, but often the copyright is transferred to the publisher. This is typical for peer reviewed research papers. However, authors often have the right to online self-archiving of their papers in archives like Organic Eprints. In order not to infringe copyrights, authors may also choose to restrict access to their papers. Read more...
Software
Organic Eprints is running on Linux and other free, open source software. It is based on the EPrints archive-creating software, version EPrints 3.4.2.
EPrints is developed at the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, England. The software is available free of charge from files.eprints.org. For more information on EPrints see eprints.org.
Statistics
Monthly hits, visits and downloads from the archive can be seen on the usage statistics page. More detailed information, such as the most downloaded eprints, can be found for each month.
