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.

269 known archives are running EPrints worldwide.

Total records in known archives: 519952

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.

Southampton's Wendy Hall Honoured

31/12/2007
An invaluable friend to Open Access, University of Southampton's Professor Wendy Hall, as Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science from 2002 to 2007, not only presided over the adoption and implementation of the world's first Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate, but she quietly went on to help get Green (ID/OA) Mandates adopted at the European level, as a founding member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council as well as President of the British Computer Society (BCS) and member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology. It is no small thanks to Wendy's support that the UK in particular and Europe in general are leading the world in its inexorable progress toward the optimal and inevitable outcome for scientific and scholarly research, at long last. And this is but one part of what Wendy has done for computer science, and science in general. Let us all celebrate her latest honour.
    (Dame Wendy was, among other things, the inventor of Microcosm, a harbinger of the Semantic Web, whose inventor -- an obscure courtly figure by the name of Sir Tim Berners-Lee -- has since likewise become one of Wendy's Southampton departmental colleagues.)


Norway's First Green Open Access Mandate; Planet's 60th

14/12/2008/
Institution's OA Eprint Archives
Institution's OA Self-Archiving Mandate
Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services (Nasjonalt kunnskapssenter for helsetjenesten, NoKC) adopted an Institutional Policy for Open Access to Scientific Publications, November 25, 2008.
All scientific publications by NoKC research staff "must" be deposited at the time of acceptance in Helsebiblioteket's Research Archive (HeRA), the new institutional repository launched by the NoKC health library (Helsebiblioteket). For each deposit, HeRA will release as much as it can as soon as it can. For example, HeRA will respect publisher embargoes, but will release OA metadata during the period when the full-text may be embargoed.


UK's 20th Green OA Mandate, Scotland's 5th, Planet's 59th

9/12/2008/
Scotland's Napier University has adopted the UK's 20th Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate (and the world's 59th)
Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives
Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy
"All research output is to be self-deposited, so that the repository forms the official record of the University’s research publications; all publication lists required for administration or promotion will be generated from this source...
"The comprehensive, online, University repository will be used in future to respond to bibliometric research assessments with reduced input and effort from staff...
"Journal articles or conference papers may be submitted as accepted drafts not yet refereed (preprints) but it is mandatory that the refereed, final, submitted, accepted, version (postprint) is later entered into the repository as the last university owned version of the document...
"Staff are not required to deposit the full text of books or research monographs, but are required to supply references along with abstracts and metadata to identify the works...
"Uploading of items in the Repository@Napier is the responsibility of authors and researchers, as advised and supported by Learning Information Services (LIS)....
"It is University policy that each depositor should be required to make the minimum effort in order to provide open online access to their research output, so the “Repository@Napier” is designed to enable uploading of documents and entry of minimal extra data...
"Initially, the repository manager or a designated assistant will upload files sent to a designated email address, but depositors will be encouraged to make their own deposits and information on the process will be made available by LIS....


US's 6th Green OA Mandate, Planet's 58th

13/11/2008/  Autism Speaks (US* funder-mandate)

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives
Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy
All researchers who receive an Autism Speaks grant will be required to deposit any resulting peer-reviewed research papers in the PubMed Central online archive, which will make the articles available to the public within 12 months of journal publication.


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