How and Why to Free the Refereed Research Literature Now

For the motivation behind the eprints.org initiative, see: "How and Why to Free the Refereed Research Literature Online Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving, Now" http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm This is to announce that, to coincide with today's Open Meeting in Washington announcing the release of OAI 1.0: http://www.openarchives.org/DC2001/OpenMeeting.html we at Southampton have simultaneously released the OAI 1.0-compliant version of the eprints.org archive-creating software Eprints Version 1.1.1 http://www.eprints.org/ The eprints software is free, of course. Originally created by Matt Hemus as CogPrints <http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk>, and then extensively re-designed for OA-compliance and generality by Robert Tansley, and recently upgraded to OAI 1.0 by Chris Gutteridge (all at Southampton University), the software has been made as flexible and adaptable as possible, so that all universities and research institutions can immediately adopt and configure it with minimal effort for all disciplines. Hence it complements centralised, discipline-based archiving with distributed, institution-based archiving. The generic version of eprints is fully interoperable with all other OAI-compliant Open Archives. This means that it no longer matters where papers are archived: The papers in all OAI-compliant Archives can be harvested using the OAI protocol <http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.htm> into one global "virtual archive" by Open Archives Service Providers <http://www.openarchives.org/sfc/sfc_services.htm> such as the Cross Archive Searching Service <http://arc.cs.odu.edu/> Below are (1) a testimonial from California Digital Libraries, one of the early adopters of the eprints.org software <http://eprints.cdlib.org/>, (2) the most recent features of eprints 1.1.1 (3) some relevant chronology and URLs. Note that all existing Eprints Archives can be upgraded to OAI 1.0-compliance with the new release. The eprints.org archive-creating software is free, draws only on free software, and will shortly be open-sourced. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad harnad(a)cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Science harnad(a)princeton.edu Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM ------------------------------------------------------------------ EPRINTS 1.1 New features should be regarded as stable; they have been well tested but they have not yet been extensively tested "in the field". Key Upgrades include: OAI 1.0 compliance support for MySQL not running on localhost support for multiple instances of eprints running on one mod_perl/apache server (1.0 claimed to do this but had some problems) new datafield "username" representing users to associate the item with. Bugfixes: mod_perl namespace collisions with multiple eprints (mentioned above). removed GNU-only command options from installation scripts. Please remember to use the online bug tracking system for reporting problems: http://bugs.eprints.org Note the new logo (symbolic of piecing together the global Eprint Archive out of the individual OAI-compliant ones) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 21:06:41 +0800 From: Catherine Candee &lt;catherine.candee(a)ucop.edu&gt; To: Stevan Harnad &lt;harnad(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk&gt; Subject: ePrints and eScholarship Stevan, Though we haven't met, I wanted to write you personally to thank you for making ePrints available. Your software is a major contribution to our mutual effort to transform the scholarly communication cycle. I am the CDL director responsible for the eScholarship program, where we are making good use of ePrints. Our repositories provide the foundation of the eScholarship infrastructure. We are providing the first three repositories to scholars in International and Area Studies, Dermatology, and Tobacco Control Research beginning tomorrow, Jan 19, 2001. We expect we will have some interesting findings as they begin to actively test and use these prototype repositories. We have some models for how the repositories will logically fit together with the kind of wider sphere of surrounding scholarly products we envision (e.g., DOJ as overlay journal), but there are many particular issues still to be resolved which may have implications for how the software is developed. We will try to report as much as we can what we learn in our experiment with ePrints. So, on behalf of the eScholarship team and the open archive community, I thank you for this wonderful piece of code. You will be receiving a more formal letter tomorrow, addressed to all eScholarship partners and contributors, which will detail more of the CDL and eScholarship activities. ePrints will be prominently featured in the letter. Best regards, Catherine Candee Director, Scholarly Communication Initiatives California Digital Library University of California 300 Lakeside Drive 6th Floor Oakland, CA 94612-3550 510.987.0425 510.893.5212 (Fax) Catherine.Candee(a)ucop.edu ______________________________________ SOME RELEVANT CHRONOLOGY AND URLs Psycoloquy (Refereed On-Line-Only Journal) (1989) http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psycoloquy "Scholarly Skywriting" (1990) http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting.html Physics Archive (1991) http://arxiv.org "PostGutenberg Galaxy" (1991) http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad91.postgutenberg.… "Interactive Publication" (1992) http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad92.interactivpub.… Self-Archiving ("Subversive") Proposal (1994) http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html "Tragic Loss" (Odlyzko) (1995) http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/tragic.loss.txt "Last Writes" (Hibbitts) (1996) http://www.law.pitt.edu/hibbitts/lastrev.htm NCSTRL: Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (1996) http://cs-tr.cs.cornell.edu University Provosts' Initiative (1997) http://library.caltech.edu/publications/ScholarsForum/ CogPrints: Cognitive Sciences Archive (1998) http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk Journal of High Energy Physics (Refereed On-Line-Only Journal) (1998) http://jhep.cern.ch/ Science Policy Forum (1998) http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/281/5382/1459 American Scientist Forum (1998) http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html OpCit:Open Citation Linking Project (1999) http://opcit.eprints.org E-biomed: Varmus (NIH) Proposal (1999) http://www.nih.gov/about/director/pubmedcentral/pubmedcentral.htm Open Archives Initiative (1999) http://www.openarchives.org Cross-Archive Searching Service (2000) http://arc.cs.odu.edu Eprints: Free OAI 1.0-compliant Eprint-Archive-creating software (2001) http://www.eprints.org Harnad Home Pages http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad/ http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html You may join the list at the site above. Discussion can be posted to: september98-forum(a)amsci-forum.amsci.org