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On July 1, California Agriculture capped off a 2-year effort with a keystroke, posting the full text of 63 years — about 6,000 articles — to the World Wide Web. This rich store of peer-reviewed science dating back to 1946 is now freely accessible and searchable at the journal's redesigned Web site.

Our previous Web site included articles dating back to 2000. Until now, however, most of California Agriculture's long history of research has been in the shadows, accessible only as bound volumes in the stacks of a few UC libraries and others scattered around the world.

Using "advanced search," users can now run a filtered search of the entire archive according to author last name, text, date and research-versus-news content. They can easily download, cite or assemble a collection for personal reference with the "My Folder" feature.

As indexing by Web crawlers progresses, the site will become accessible through multiple entry points. These include search engines such as Google and Google Scholar, and the scholarly databases Thomson ISI's Current Contents, the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau, Proquest, AGRICOLA and EBSCO. The entire archive will also be posted at the California Digital Library and ANR Communication Services.

California Agriculture began as a four-page broadsheet in December 1946. Today both print and Web versions are known for presenting new, peer-reviewed research in a meaningful context with technical terms defined — making it accessible to a diverse audience of end-users. Print subscribers include 17,000 growers, faculty members, environmental and health professionals, government researchers, public officials and others.

The California Agriculture archive includes landmark research that knitted together understanding of food and fiber production, forestry and fisheries, and how those endeavors influenced, and were affected by, the natural environment and ecosystems at every scale.

California Agriculture's archive includes some of the earliest reports of integrated pest management, biological control, the effects of agricultural chemicals on wildlife, causes and effects of water and air pollution, and fisheries research — to name a few. More recent articles encompass sustainable food systems, conservation tillage, biodiversity, urban encroachment, demographics, nutrition, food safety, biotechnology and climate change, all with an eye to evolving conditions in California.

The new Web site enables both scholarly and lay audiences to access this research through the assignment of a digital object identifier (DOI) to each article. DOIs are unique numbers for each article, which are deposited at CrossRef. Launched in 2000, Cross Ref is a cooperative effort among scholarly publishers to enable cross-publisher citation linking in online academic journals.

We are still fine-tuning the Web site, and welcome your comments and feedback. Please take the online survey on the home page, or write to us at calagwebmaster@ucanr.org.

Janet White

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