Eprints
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Eprints is free, open source software for generating an "Open Access" (OA) "Institutional Repository" (IR) that is compliant with the "Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting" (OAI-PMH).
Eprints was created in 2000 as a direct outcome of the 1999 Santa Fe meeting that launched what eventually became the OAI-PMH. The Eprints software was enthusiastically received, became the first and still the most widely used free OA IR software, and has since inspired many emulations.
The OA/IR-creating software, Eprints, is not to be confused with the primary target contents of OA IRs, namely, "eprints" (or "e-prints"), which are preprints (before peer review) and postprints (after peer review), of research journal articles: "eprints" = preprints + postprints.
[edit] Towards Understanding the Role of Eprints in the Information Landscape, Open Repositories Conference 2007
Last January the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories gathered visionaries for the first time in Sydney http://www.apsr.edu.au/Open_Repositories_2006/ to share information about how Dspace, Fedora, and Eprints repositories were changing the nature of scholarly and commercial information communities of practice. The upcoming Open Repositories Conference will bring user communities and others a step closer to understanding the pivotal role that repositories play in the emerging information landscape. Institutions such as universities, research laboratories, publishers, libraries, and commercial organizations are creating innovative repository-based systems that address the entire lifecycle of information—from supporting the creation and management of digital content, to enabling use, re-use, and interconnection of information, to ultimately ensuring long-term preservation and archiving. Open Repositories 2007 (OR07) will bring global stakeholders together again to discuss the challenges inherent in the conference tagline, “Achieving Interoperability in an Open World.” What are the policy issues that are implied in an open world? What are the technical challenges in achieving interoperability across heterogenesous repositories and related services? How can advanced repository-based systems enable the collaborative processes around “e-science” and scholarly communication? What are the challenges in enabling users to discover and access information across distributed repositories? What does open access to content mean across cultures? These are just some of the questions that attendees will ponder during the three-and-a-half day conference scheduled for January 23-26, 2007 in San Antonio, Texas.
Dspace, Fedora, and Eprints User Group meetings will be held on Jan. 23 and 24, followed by combined conference plenary sessions on Jan. 24, 25 and 26. The conference reception and poster session will take place on Jan. 24. Advance registration for the conference is open until December 22, 2006. More information including an at-a-glance conference schedule and plenary, keynote and user group session descriptions is available at http://openrepositories.org/.
