CABI News

agriRxiv – pronounced agri-archive, and previously known as AgriXiv – is to be relaunched with a new website offering researchers and students access to preprints across agriculture and allied sciences.

Preprints are drafts of research articles that authors typically share with the wider community for feedback before submitting their final version to a journal and formal peer-review. They bring many advantages: preprints allow researchers to share their results rapidly, in just a few days; they reach a global audience and there’s no charge for authors or readers; they provide an early forum for discussion and allow authors to get informal feedback on their article prior to submitting an improved version to a journal for peer review.

The new and enhanced platform, which is hosted and managed by CABI, aims to benefit from the organisation’s greater global reach and sustainability. It draws on CABI’s extensive expertise in agricultural data, information and knowledge dissemination. agriRxiv will benefit from the technical and content management infrastructure used to deliver CABI’s subscription products, like CAB Abstracts – the leading English-language bibliographic information service providing access to the world’s applied life sciences literature, which has almost 10 million records.

As well as being able to submit preprints, users will, over time, be able to search and filter records with far more precision, and stay abreast of all the latest submissions, news and updates from the agriRxiv platform.

Dr Andrew Robinson, Managing Director, Publishing, at CABI, said: “We’re excited to help agriRxiv take its next big step in providing the global agricultural research community with a high quality and sustainable preprint service.

“It’s part of our commitment to “open science” in agriculture and complements our work with governments and research funders to develop open and FAIR data-sharing policies and practices. We also have a pilot Research Collaboration Portal, in development at the moment to help scientist’s network, collaborate and share, in real-time, their data and results about managing the devastating crop pest, Fall Armyworm.

“agriRxiv also sits alongside our soon-to-be launched open access journal, CABI Agriculture and Bioscience. Since preprints are completely free to share and open, they provide a rapid route for researchers everywhere, but especially in developing countries, to reach a global audience at no cost.”

Dr Sridhar Gutam, from Open Access India, which launched AgriXiv in 2017 said: “We are really pleased to be able to collaborate with CABI to provide a sustainable home for agriRxiv. In this COVID-19 crisis we’ve seen a massive uptake of preprints to rapidly share research in services like bioRxiv and medRxiv.

“We want agriculture to benefit in the same way, accelerating research into tackling the recent locust infestations in East Africa and the spread of Fall Armyworm in Africa and Asia as just two current examples.

“I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank the Center for Open Science for hosting us on their OSF Preprints platform. Without them we would not have been able to develop the service.”

Sridhar Gutam will continue to Co-Chair the agriRxiv Advisory Board, along with Andrew Robinson. Dr Gutam added, “We are really keen to ensure that agriRxiv represents the wider global research community in agriculture. So, we want to actively engage with the leading academic societies, research institutions and funders, and the editors of agriculture journals, to align with their policies and promote the service to their researchers and authors.

“All of the deposited preprints are made available under a suitable creative commons license and authors retain the copyright. Most funders, publishers and journals now see preprints as a complement to the existing channels for sharing research, and accept that articles previously posted on services like agriRxiv can be submitted for publication.

“If you would like to get involved on the advisory board, or as an affiliate – to help us screen some submissions – please get in touch.”

For more information on agriRxiv visit www.agrirxiv.org and sign-up for the latest updates and news, or follow @agriRxiv on social media.