Open Access and Institutional Repositories with EPrints

EPrints is the most flexible platform for building high quality, high value repositories, recognised as the easiest and fastest way to set up repositories of research literature, scientific data, student theses, project reports, multimedia artefacts, teaching materials, scholarly collections, digitised records, exhibitions and performances.

Within this site you will find information and resources to make open access a reality within your own institution: open source software and support, commercial hosting, training and development services and also open access advice and information.

Training Latest: The collected material from EPrints training courses is now available in the EPrints Training Library.

EPrints Repository Software

EPrints open source software is a flexible platform for building high quality, high value repositories. It is recognised as the easiest and fastest way to set up repositories of research outputs of literature, scientific data, theses and reports or multimedia artefacts from collections, exhibitions and performances.

"EPrints is quick to install, easy to configure, and needs minimal maintenance" Arthur Sale, 2005

"[EPrints] developers are on the ball, offering features that faculty will actually find useful" Dorothea Salo, 2007

  • Archive Documents, Multimedia and Data
  • Multi-Language Support
  • OAI Compliant

An Institutional Repository is the best way to provide Open Access to research output.

268 known archives are running EPrints worldwide.

Total records in known archives: 486817

EPrints is developed at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK.

EPrints Services

The EPrints services team provides a fee-based advice and consultancy service that can deliver a range of solutions, from initial help and guidance through to a completely managed service for an institutional repository.

We have experience with deploying repositories at all scales, ranging from large, broad-based research universities to single-subject departments, and will take time to understand your particular requirements. Our goal is always to deliver a repository that fulfils all your needs.

"moved the institutional repository forward swiftly, efficiently and successfully." The Open University

"speed of response has been phenomenal" Bournemouth University

EPrints Community

EPrints has a growing community of users and enthusiastic supporters around the world.

Our dedicated community programme, works with the community to ensure EPrints meets their needs and to help spread best practice.

Open Access to Research

We are creating the environment in which Open Access will become the norm for distributing research:

Other Projects

CiteBase is part of an effort to improve online services for the research community, These resources will provide a rich information source and navigation system (based on impact and other metrics) to the self-archiving movement.

The Open Citation Project developed reference Linking and Citation Analysis for Open Archives.

OAI: The Open Archives Initiative is making all OAI-compliant Archives interoperable. The EPrints software creates OAI-Compliant Archives.

BOAI: Budapest Open Access Initiative is a worldwide coordinated movement to make full-text online access to all peer-reviewed research free for all.

Paracite: Dynamic parsing of references and assisted web searching to find the full texts of those references.

National Research Council (Canada): 49th Green OA Self-Archiving Manda

17/7/2008/ With today's Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate announcement from Canada's National Research Council, that makes 49 mandates adopted and 12 more proposed. See ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies).
      Let us hope that NRC will sensibly require that authors deposit directly in their own Institutional Repositories, from which NRC's planned central repository, NPArC, can then harvest the deposit, rather than needlessly requiring -- as NIH currently does -- direct institution-external deposit. The optimal mandate is of course ID/OA (immediate deposit/optional access) rather than delayed or optional deposit.


Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide

01/07/2008 From the OAK Law Project: by Kylie Pappalardo (with the assistance of Professor Brian Fitzgerald, Professor Anne Fitzgerald, Scott Kiel-Chisholm, Jenny Georgiades and Anthony Austin):

Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors aims to provide practical guidance for academic authors interested in making their work more openly accessible to readers and other researchers. The guide provides authors with an overview of the concept of and rationale for open access to research outputs and how they may be involved in its implementation and with what effect. In doing so it considers the central role of copyright law and publishing agreements in structuring an open access framework as well as the increasing involvement of funders and academic institutions. The guide also explains different methods available to authors for making their outputs openly accessible, such as publishing in an open access journal or depositing work into an open access repository. Importantly, the guide addresses how open access goals can affect an author’s relationship with their commercial publisher and provides guidance on how to negotiate a proper allocation of copyright interests between an author and publisher. A Copyright Toolkit is provided to further assist authors in managing their copyright.


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