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About Open Access

Benefits from Open Access

Organic Eprints has been established to promote open access to research results within organic agriculture. Open access means that the documents 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. Open access to research products can thereby support the building of international research networks. Open access has been shown to increase not only the access but also the impact of papers in terms of citations.

In the long run, the quality of the research can be improved by way of improved communication of research results. Depositing a paper in an open access archive can contribute to the revision of that paper for later publication by way of attracting critical comments. In the Organic Eprints archive comments can be made within the archive, where they are linked to the document they comment on, or directly to the depositing author, whose contact details is in the archive.

Open Access Initiatives

Organic Eprints is part of an international open access movement that promotes free online access to the publications from public research, see the Budapest Open Access Initiative. As part of the open access movement, work is going on to create open access archives, see e.g. Open Archives Initiative (OAI). Free open source software for creating such archives is available from EPrints.org and DSpace.org.

Other open access archives include:

  • arXiv, a very large archive in the fields of physics and mathematics,
  • CogPrints with papers from cognitive science and related areas, and
  • PhilSci Archive with philosophy of science preprints.