About Organic Eprints
Policy - Background and Support - Open Access - Copyright issues - Statistics - Software and Development
The Organic Eprints archive has been developed by the Danish Research Centre for Organic Farming, DARCOF, since 2002. 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.
Archive Policy
The Organic Eprints archive is a tool to further develop research in organic agriculture. The main objectives are to facilitate the communication of research papers and proposals, 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.
The archive will accept many kinds of papers: preprints (pre-review), postprints (post-review) and reprints (published) of scientific papers, conference papers and posters, theses, reports, books and book chapters, magazine articles, web products, project descriptions, and other published or unpublished documents.
The only criteria for acceptance are that the documents are relevant to research in organic agriculture, that they have a finished form that is ready to enter into a process of communication, and that the required metadata information is correct. All languages are supported, but we do encourage adding an English abstract if the abstract is in another language than English.
Removal of eprints is strongly discouraged, since this will break any links made to that eprint (e.g. comments made in the archive, citations, references on discussion lists, etc.). Instead the archive allows for the upload of later versions of an eprint, and readers are directed to the latest version. The archive administrator will, however, remove eprints upon request.
Disclaimer
All of the entries, statements, results etc. contained in the Organic Eprints archive have been compiled by the authors according to their best knowledge and the metadata have been scrupulously checked by the Danish Research Centre for Organic Farming (DARCOF) and the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL). All depositors of eprints have agreed with the Deposit Agreement below.
However, the possibility of mistakes can not be ruled out entirely. Therefore, the responsible partners behind Organic Eprints, the archive staff and the depositors are not subject to any obligation and make no guarantees whatsoever regarding any of the statements etc. on this website; neither do they accept responsibility or liability for any possible mistakes contained therein.
The links to other websites on the Organic Eprints pages are for informational purposes only. DARCOF, FiBL and the depositors are not responsible for the availability or content of these sites. In addition, providing links to these sites should not be interpreted as endorsement or approval by DARCOF or FiBL.
Deposit Agreement
When depositing an eprint the depositors consents with the following agreement:
"In depositing this eprint (a collection of files and associated metadata), I grant Organic Eprints the right to make it permanently available on-line, with open access to all or in accordance with any access restrictions that I have specified. (Removal of eprints from the public archive is strongly discouraged, but will be granted upon request.)
I understand that Organic Eprints does not assume any responsibility if there is any breach of copyright in distributing these files or metadata.
For work being deposited by its own first author: I declare that this eprint is my own intellectual property and that I have the right to make it available in Organic Eprints in the manner chosen.
For work being deposited by someone other than its first author: I declare that I have gained the proper permissions from someone with the right to make this eprint available in Organic Eprints in the manner chosen - or that the material is in the public domain.
Clicking on the deposit button indicates your agreement to these terms."
Background and Support
Organic Eprints was established on September 18th, 2002 as an online community service by DARCOF, the Danish Research Centre for Organic Farming. Since 2003 there has been a cooperation with the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture, FiBL. Staff and contact details are available at the Contact Information page.
At present, FiBL acts as editor for database entries from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Additionally it is instructed to enter all research results of the Federal Organic Farming Scheme (Bundesprogramm Ökologischer Landbau BÖL) into the archive. These activities are funded by the Ministry of Consumer Protection, Nutrition and Angriculture. Additionally, FiBL startet to enter all FiBL publications into the database.
At the moment, DARCOF acts as editor for entries from all other countries. DARCOF has decided to make its full research production available on Organic Eprints.
DARCOF and FiBL have developed a set of general conditions for collaboration on the archive "Organic Eprints", and we invite other institutes and organizations to join us in managing and developing this service. The archive can be managed through the internet so that each country or organization can have its own editor. At present, there are an English and a German language interface and we encourage adding more translations. It will also be desirable to establish mirror sites in other countries.
We encourage other institutes, organizations and individual researchers involved in organic research to utilize and contribute to this service, even if you do not wish to engage as formal partners. Deposited documents can be categorized according to your country, organization and project, and new categories will be added as needed. The more papers that are made available, the more useful will the archive become.
Apart from the main partners, the archive is supported by other institutes in different ways. These supporters are listed on our Supporters of Organic Eprints page.
Open Access
Organic Eprints has been established to promote open access to research results. 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 the impact of papers in terms of citations (e.g. Lawrence, 2001). 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.
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. An overview of the issues that motivate the open access movement can be found here. The SPARC Open Access Newsletter and the attached Forum is an excellent source of information edited by Peter Suber.
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. Archives that meet the OAI standards can be searched and harvested by cross-archive tools such as Citebase (still experimental).
Other open access archives are e.g. 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. Steve Hitchcock maintains a comprehensive meta-list of open access eprint archives.
More specific information, that can help you decide what access you can give to particular documents, is available on our Open Access and Copyrights page.
Usage 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 papers, can be found for each month.
Software and Development
Organic Eprints is running on Linux and other open source software. It is based on GNU EPrints archive-creating software, revision: EPrints 2.3.12 (Southern Chicken) [Born on 2005-05-24].
More information on the software and on the development of Organic Eprints is available on our Development and Software page.
