Organic Eprints – An International Online Archive 20-year anniversary report

Summary

This report is published on the occasion of Organic Eprints’ 20-year anniversary. The report briefly describes the history of Organic Eprints, but its focus is on the functionality and bene-fits of Organic Eprints to the users of research based knowledge and those who are involved in the research process, and not least on the future of organic Eprints.
Organic Eprints has developed rapidly in content and functionality since it was established in 2002 by the International Centre for Research in Organic Food Systems, ICROFS, formerly Danish Research Centre for Organic Farming - DARCOF. In the spring of 2023 there are almost 30,000 eprints available and more than 131,000 downloaded eprints per month worldwide. In 2003 the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL Switzerland) joined Organic Eprints as its first international partner, and from 2004 a close collaboration with the CORE Organic pro-gramme was established with a team of editors from all CORE Organic countries. However, to further develop and secure Organic Eprints for the future it is vital to bring Organic Eprints to the next step by the engagement of more funders and partners. Therefore, a new govern-ance structure is under development and implementation.
The European Commission has decided that 25% of the EU’s farmland should be organic by 2030. In order to achieve this goal, research, knowledge, and dissemination related to this is a prerequisite. Over the last decades, a lot of research on organic farming and food systems has been carried out, and results from this research has been collected in Organic Eprints. Thus, Organic Eprints is more important than ever to fulfil the objectives of the reformed Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and to help achieve the ambitious EU policy agendas of the Farm to Fork Strategy and the European Green Deal.
Executive summary
Organic Eprints is an international open-access archive dedicated to research on organic farm-ing and food. A wide variety of items can be found in the archive, such as published or sub-mitted peer reviewed papers as well as dissemination publications, conference items, books and reports, theses, practice tools or video files. Currently, there are almost 30,000 eprints available. Therefore, Organic Eprints offers a great collection of research outputs and has a large outreach with more than 131,000 downloaded eprints per month. As the only online archive solely dedicated to research on organic farming and food, Organic Eprints has notable benefits to users, authors, and institutions. Some key benefits are that Organic Eprints makes it easy to get an overview of the organic research, which can be filtered by e.g., institution, subject area, project, or conference, making it possible to assess who is working on which subjects. It also makes it easy for authors to reach the organic community. Organic Eprints is used internationally, al-though most activity takes place in Europe. The three biggest subject areas amongst eprints are animal husbandry, crop husbandry and food systems. The user interface is available in English and German; however, user guides are available in multiple languages and eprints can be uploaded in all languages. Editors make quality control of items from their region and help maintain the archive.