Organic Eprints expands the number of editors and users

Time invested by project participants on updating their entries in Organic Eprints has a prosperous chance of paying back multifold in terms of dissemination of resarch results

Organic Eprints is the open access archive for communications in organic research, that was started by DARCOF in 2002. The archive is open for deposition of all communications related to organic research from all parts of the world.

Initially, the editorial task was in the hands of DARCOF, that established a cooperation with FiBL and BÖL. However, as the archive has evolved about 20 national editors in different countries has now been appointed (see Core Organic homepage). Thus, scientists in more countries will have one or more national contact persons for help with deposition of papers in the archive.

More than 3000 visits per day

Statistics of the archive show a tremendous increase in the number of visitors that use the site as a source for literature on organic research (Figure 1). Thus, during 2005 the number of visits to the site has increased from about 1200 to a range of 3000 - on a daily basis! This means that the number of visits each month is in the range of 60.000 to 80.000. Furthermore, the total number of countries represented in the user statistics is 143.

Clearly, this shows that deposition in Organic Eprints is an effective way of presenting and sharing knowledge with colleagues and stakeholders in organic research worldwide. And this is one of the reasons why the QLIF project gives high priority to deposition of project papers, reports and other communications in the open access archive.

Figure 1. Number of visits on Organic Eprints from February 2005 to January 2006.

Versatility in deposited documents

The archive 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theses, reports, books and book chapters, magazine articles, web products, project descriptions, and other published or unpublished documents.

Indeed, this versality makes the archive a very dynamic tool for keeping track of new results and developments in the organic research world. Thus, while other excellent systems exists for searches for reviewed journal articles, Organic Eprints offers a unique possibility to get access to literaure that are generally complemetary to or even ahead of these publications.

Excellent search and project overview options

A powerfull tool in the Organic Eprints archive is the possibility to make specific searches based on a variaty of searchable fields. For example a search on 'health' and 'pig' shows that 29 entries are available on this combination of topics.

Also, the database can be browsed by various criteria, such as subject area, project affiliation or peer review status. This means that a complete project overview of issued papers and communications can be obtained from a few clicks in Organic Eprints (Figure 2). This implies, of course, that project participants regularly upload their contributions to the archive.

Figure 2. Outline of the browser facility, that gives an overview of the output from the QLIF project, deposited in Organic Eprints.

The facility shown above can be directly coupled to a project homepage, such as www.qlif.org, in a way that enables a visitor at the homepage to proceed directly to an updated overview of publications issued from the project the visitor selected.

Regular use and deposition of communications in the Organic Eprints archive is an advantage for all research projects on organic food and farming. Both as a means of sharing knowledge and stimulating the interest in ongoing project activites. For projects with the size and complexity of QLIF it further offers a means of increased coherency between different subprojects as current research progress can be followed and integrated in complemetary projects.