American Herbal Pharmacopoeia Grows Its Publishing Roots
American Herbal Pharmacopoeia (AHP) is a California-based nonprofit research organization operating since 1996. The organization's mission is to promote the responsible use of herbal products and herbal medicines. AHP's primary goal is to develop standards of identity, purity, quality, and testing for botanical ingredients. It strives to ensure a high level of accuracy, clinical applicability, and safety of herbal ingredients based on both traditional and scientific data. It provides practitioners and industry with the resources needed to assess the authenticity and quality of botanical raw materials. AHP's work has been recognized by the U.S. FDA, and the organization has also influenced regulations in the European Community.
Pavel Axentiev, associate editor for AHP, reports that the organization has been a TechSoup member since 2009. As a regular user of word processing programs and design tools, he notes, "We have greatly benefited from using the software that we got through TechSoup." Axentiev goes on to explain that production of AHP's publication, "which has been done mostly on the software obtained from TechSoup," would not otherwise be possible. For the writing and editing, graphic design and layout, and finally digital publishing, they routinely use Adobe Creative Suite, including Photoshop and InDesign as well as Adobe Acrobat and the Microsoft Office package obtained from TechSoup. They have a limited base of supporters and a limited budget, and paying full price for this kind of software would be unlikely says Axentiev.
AHP's goal is to write comprehensive research on 300 botanicals. So far, it has completed about 30. Without the software at its fingertips, Axientiev says, "we'd have to figure out how to get all of this done another way."
