As of EPrints 3.4.0, the EPrints repository platform became more flexible. Prior to this, the default installation of EPrints was aimed at the Open Access Publications use case. The meant that using it for other types of repository required extra work to hide or disable Publication specific features, before extending to meet the needs of the current project.
EPrints 3.4 is arranged with a generic core, with the Publications-specific features factored out into a library, or ‘flavour’. This allows for other flavours to be developed more cleanly. As most EPrints repositories are used for its original use case, the Publications flavour is distributed alongside the core.
There are a number of Flavours available.
- Publications – providing the original OA publication feature set. Provided as part of EPrints.
- Data – provision specific extensions, integrations and presentations to support EPrints as a Research Data repository.
- Education – Also known as EdShare, a version of EPrints aimed at openly sharing educational resources. Provided by EPrints Services
- Impact – A version of EPrints created for capturing research-led impact case studies and data. Available to download from GitHub.
As well as the introduction of EPrints Flavours, 3.4 also introduced Ingredients. These are typically used to model a specific feature or extension (similar to the EPrints Bazaar), these are then used to underpin Flavours. Common Ingredients are used in several Flavours. Ingredients are either supplied as part of EPrints core, or if part of a larger public project have their own project on Github.