This page is the archive of news items before August 2005.
From Open Access News: Christopher Gutteridge has won the 2005 UKUUG Open Source Award for his work on GNU EPrints. See University of Southampton press release.
"Participants in the Berlin3 conference issued a recommendation that institutions wishing to implement the Berlin Declaration on Open Access should 'require their researchers to deposit a copy of all their published articles in an open access repository' and 'encourage their researchers to publish their research articles in open access journals where a suitable journal exists and provide the support to enable that to happen.' Such institutions needn't re-word or re-sign the Berlin Declaration, but merely register their commitment and describe their policies."
From Peter Suber's Timeline of the Open Access Movement
Berlin 3, the sequel to the Berlin 2 meeting on implementing the Berlin Declaration on Open Access will be held at the University of Southampton 28 February to 1 March 2005 with support from JISC. Please watch this space for further details.
A two-day meeting on the practice and politics of OA Institutional Repositories (OA Archives) in the UK will be held on Jan 25th and 26th 2005 at the University of Southampton. These workshps are for all those responsible for initiating, directing, managing and implementing repositories at large institutions, especially research-led universities, and those planning large-scale OA Archiving projects. See http://www.eprints.org/jan2005/ for full details and joining instructions.
A decision by University of Southampton to provide core funding for its Institutional Repository establishes it as a central part of its research infrastructure, marking a new era for Open Access to academic research in the UK.
It is hoped that other universities will now follow this model.
CogPrints has been upgraded to the latest version of GNU EPrints 2.3.7. The site now has much shorter URLs. Instead of http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000432/ you can refer to http://cogprints.org/432/ (although all old URLs continue to work). Also we've used the new 2.3.7 style sheet to make it look nicer.
The style of the default archive has been overhauled to be neater and make better use of stylesheets. See: http://demoprints.eprints.org/
The US House-Senate conference committee has approved the NIH public access plan. The report restates the NIH proposed policy of making research articles based on NIH funding available to the public free of charge.
Wellcome Trust grantees will be required to self-archive all peer reviewed research articles based on Wellcome-funded research, free for all would-be users webwide.
Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) report that 417,147 of the articles indexed in their 2003 Journal Citation Reports were published in non-OA journals for which it is known that their publishers have given their authors the green light to self-archive them. (From this sample, we can also estimate that the journals in which 635,001 (85%) of the total 747,060 ISI-indexed articles for 2003 were green.)
Delivery, Management and Access Model for E-prints and Open Access Journals within Further and Higher Education. Alma Swan, Paul Needham, Steve Probets, Adrienne Muir, Ann O'Brien, Charles Oppenheim, Rachel Hardy, and Fytton Rowland (2004).
"[T]he archives that are being created are not being filled with e-prints quickly enough to provide open access to the bulk of UK scholarly literature... There are ways in which this inertia may be overcome, including mandating the self-archiving of e-prints of published articles by authors in institutional e-print archives... This mandate could be implemented by the institutions themselves or by research-funders....The study therefore recommends the 'harvesting' model...constituting a UK national service founded upon creating an interoperable network of OAI-compliant, distributed, institution-based e-print archives. "
Steve Hitchcock, The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies, The Open Citation Project , to be continuously updated. "A very useful collection of the studies and evidence. Now I have a single page to which I can refer people when I cite the proposition that OA increases citation impact." -- Peter Suber, Open Access News
In InfoToday Online Peter Jacso reviews three search utilities in his Picks and Pans column (p.57), and calls Citebase Search "the crown jewel of the Open Citation Project," noting its facility in searching open access sources such as ArXiv, Cogprints, and BioMed Central.
Mandatory self-archiving has been recommended (among other OA measures) in a Brief to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) by The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) as well as in the Scottish Science Information Strategy Working Group's [Open Access] Declaration (Draft) Similar recommendations have already been made in the UK, US, Australia, India, and Norway. It is now a historic race to see which nation implements the recommendation first. (France, Germany, and possibly the Netherlands and others are closing in too.) This is more or less reflected in the the current rank order of the number of OA Eprint Archives of the top 14 countries in the Institutional Archives Registry : United States (57), United Kingdom (33), Canada (17), France (15), Sweden (13), Germany (12), Netherlands (12), Italy (11), Australia (9), India (4), Brazil (4), Hungary (4), China (4), Denmark (3).
The Journal version of the Romeo Directory of Publisher Self-Archiving Policies is now up to date at http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php. Of the 8915 journals (from 102 publishers) surveyed to date, 92% have already given their green light to author/institute self-archiving. The core publishers are already covered, but if you know the self-archiving policies of any further publishers, please enter them at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeoupdate.php and provide their journal lists at http://romeo.eprints.org/corrections.php
In a Workshop on Institutional Repositories at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India 27-29 July 2004, participants from 21 leading Indian academic research institutions received training in setting up institutional e-print archives using the GNU EPrints open source software to fulfill a recommendation of the INDEST consortium to its member institutions to set up OAI-compliant Open Access Eprint Archives for their research publications, on the model of the Indian Institute of Science. After the workshop, most participants felt confident of setting up e-print archives in their institutions. Many expressed the need for further help and suggested more hands-on time in future workshops.
Presentations, reports and proposals are now available from the invitational one-day roundtable workshop jointly hosted by JISC and the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at Southampton University
The report of the UK House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology -- "Scientific Publications: Free for all?" -- is particularly welcome for its balanced recommendations on Open Access (OA) Publishing and Self-Archiving. For self-archiving, the Committee specifically recommends that:
(a) universities should be funded to provide institutional OA eprint archives,
(b) authors should self-archive their papers within a month of publication,
(c) funding councils should mandate that all their funded work is self-archived and
(d) the British government should act as an agent for change both in the UK and in the international arena.
On July 14, 2004, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee adopted a set of recommendations for next year's federal budget. One key recommendation would have the effect of providing open access (OA) to articles based on research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Here are the most important specific provisions from the report:
* Articles based on NIH-funded research must be deposited in PubMed Central (PMC) at the time they are accepted by a journal for publication.See Peter Suber's FAQ
* If the NIH paid any part of the article's publication costs, then PMC will provide open access to the article immediately upon deposit. Otherwise, PMC will provide open access six months after * the article's publication in a journal.
* The committee directs NIH to submit a plan by December 1, 2004, to implement this recommendation in FY 2005.
Harnad, S. & Brody, T. (2004) Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs.
Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals, D-Lib Magazine 10 (6) June
This ISI citation impact study reports that journal articles
that have been made Open Access by self-archiving are cited up to 5
times
as much as articles in the same journal that are not self-archived.
To inform and motivate research funding agencies and research institutions in the UK, Australia and other countries to help institutions provide open access to their own research output on a large scale by setting up institutional digital archives of refereed research papers (eprints) to maximise and monitor their research impact.
This is to announce the Eprints User's Handbook. The Handbook was commissioned by the Open Society Institute and written by Dr. Les Carr, Southampton University.
The Handbook is designed for all Eprints Users:
Especially important are the strategic suggestions for implementing a systematic institutional self-archiving policy. Feedback is invited. The Handbook will be continuously expanded in response to queries and suggestions from users.
Tim Brody of Southampton University has now created a Registry for Open Access Eprint Archives -- both GNU EPrints archives and other archives. The only requirement is that they be open-access and OAI-compliant: http://archives.eprints.org
He also has charts plotting Eprint Archive growth, both in number of archives and in number of papers in the archives.
The Registry also makes it possible for you to add any Eprint Archive you know of that is not yet in the Registry. Please do add any Eprint Archive you know of.
OSI has released of the second edition of the Guide to Institutional Repository Software. The guide has been updated to reflect comments and suggestions following the release of the first edition. OSI intends to update the guide on a regular basis. EPrints continues to be described as having "largest and most broadly distributed" number of installed systems of the seven described.
Under Deputy Vice-Chancellor Tom Cochrane, the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia, in consultation with the major stakeholders, has adopted a university self-archiving policy (effective January 2004) with a clear institutional mandate which will be backed up with "plenty of promotion, training and support." More Information.
ePrints UK Project will be running a series of 5 workshops around the UK that will provide anintroduction to eprints and institutional repositories and the issuessurrounding them. These workshops will be aimed at HE/FE librarians,information systems staff and academics and will be free to attend.The first workshop will be held at the University of Bath on Friday 6th February 2004. Further details of the programme are available here. You can register for the event here.
In Issue 37 of Ariadne, William Nixon provides an overview of the DAEDALUS Project's initial experiences with the GNU EPrints and DSpace software and the decision to use both pieces of software.
The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities has just been signed. For its implications for eprint self-archiving, see: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin.htm
The OSI have produced a very useful document for anybody considering which archive software to use for their archive. It describes and compares features of CDSware, DSpace, Eprints, i-Tor, and MyCoRe.
Oxford University Press (OUP) partnership with Oxford University Library Services, (OULS) in support of the national SHERPA project http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ using GNU EPrints software. OUP will provide OULS institutional eprint archive with online access to articles by Oxford University-based authors, available free of charge to researchers across the globe.
Frances Boyle (OULS): "Our first task is to set up a server with the eprints.org software over the coming months. The collaboration with OUP will enable us to populate the repository with quality content. This initiative will kick-start the project and will enable OULS to host a demonstrator system for the many interested stakeholders at Oxford."
Steve Hitchcock's Core metalist of open access eprint archives has moved, reorganized, and changed its name to Explore Open Archives. It's now maintained by the OpCit Project. It's the most thorough and up-to-date directory of OAI-compliant eprint repositories on the net.
Metalist of open access eprint archives: the genesis of institutional archives and independent services Core Metalist, Commented Metalist.
Data on the numbers and growth of eprint archives of various kinds are available in figures 15-25 of the powerpoint series of 37 in: Power Point, HTML.
For its one-year anniversary, the BOAI has launched the BOAI Forum which will be hosted at http://threader.ecs.soton.ac.uk/lists/boaiforum/ and moderated by Peter Suber Sign on at: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f
Institutional repositories provide a compelling response to two strategic imperatives of most academic institutions: (1) access to and impact of research, (2) providing indicators of institution's quality and scientific, societal, and economic relevance of its research, increasing the institution's visibility, status, and public value.
Caltech Collection of Open Digital Archives (CODA) provides the strongest and longest-standing example of university self-archiving policy, a model for all other universities to follow. See CalTech's presentation at the International Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) Meeting of of Academies of Science: http://library.caltech.edu/evdv/CODA.ppt
This version adds support for subject editors (who many only approve and edit items which match a certain subject or type), support for the XML::GDOME module (which makes it faster). There is also a number of small configuration options people have asked for, and bugfixes. For more details see the New Features page.
Will 2002 be seen as the watershed year when the Open Archives Initiative
(OAI) really took off and began to have an impact on global scholarly
communication? The OAI develops and promotes interoperability standards that
aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The Eprints.org free
software is OAI compliant and enables institutional archiving with appropriate
harvesting." Steele's survey of eprint archiving progress is especially strong
on recent developments in Australia.
Colin Steele,
E-prints: the future of scholarly communication? inCite, October 2002.
Organic Eprints is an open access archive for eprints related to organic agriculture. Digitale Publikationen der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München shows ep2 running completely translated into German. For a list of more sites running eprints, see the bottom of the eprints.org homepage.
The evolution of an institutional e-prints archive at the University of Glasgow William Nixon, with another practical perspective on setting up an e-prints archive. Available online in Ariadne Issue 32.
Project SHERPA ('Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access') puts Edinburgh into a partnership of research libraries across the UK in developing a set of 'open archives' in an effort to address the 'scholarly publishing crisis' manifest in the spiralling cost of academic journals. More Information.
The TARDIS Project at Southampton will create an eprints archive for Southampton University. The process of doing so will give direct feedback to the GNU EPrints software. More Information: http://tardis.eprints.org.
2nd Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI): Gaining independence with e-prints archives and OAI. 17-19 October 2002. http://documents.cern.ch/AGE/current/fullAgenda.php?ida=a02333
Institutional eprint archiving is currently undergoing a unprecedented surge of acceptance and support. This article discusses many current activities and initiatives. Full article.
A SPARC Position Paper (The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition). View Article.
We will soon begin raising awareness of Citebase in the wider academic community, but first we are anxious to ensure that it will be useful and usable. So I am hereby inviting those of you with the interest and time to test Citebase now and give us feedback on it. A Web form takes you through a short exercise highlighting its principal features at: http://citebase.eprints.org/survey/
The subject matter is still mainly physics, but the general utility of citation-ranked navigation will be, we hope, transparent.
Ariadne has published this useful article: Setting up an institutional e-print archive
This version adds OAI 2.0 support and a Subscription service. See the New Features page for more details. [UPDATE] The current version is now 2.1.1 due to a post-release bug spotted in the OAI2.0 support.
EPrints is now part of the GNU project. In a nutshell this means it has to conform to some code and distribution standards, and has to be free. Longer explanation.
This version of EP2 fixes a few bugs, issues and typos in 2.0. If you are running eprints 2.0 you should upgrade.
The result of much work and sleepless nights, EPrints 2.0 is ready! Get it from the download page. Be sure to read the installation instructions.
EPrints Community Forums provide a place to chat about eprints, OAI and related issues.
This is an announcement for a CURL ePrints Workshop to be held at the University of Glasgow on Monday, the 4th of March.
This workshop will provide an overview of the range of technical, cultural and legal issues which are involved in the development and implementation of an ePrints services.
It will be of particular interest for staff interested in how to proceed with the development of an Open Archives service using the ePrints software.
EPrints 2 Alpha-2 has been released! This version actually works (alpha-1 was pretty much a preview). Please see the EPrints 2 page for more information.
CDL has entered into a partnership with bepress.com. The press release is available here. Through this partnership, CDL will make a suite of bepress publishing tools available to University of California researchers.
The first version of our EPrints registration system is now online at http://www.eprints.org/users.php. Please report any bugs that may appear.
Version 1.1.2 is required for OAI1.1 compliance, and also includes minor improvements to name searches. See the download page for more information.
The results from our survey of EPrints users and non-users are now online: http://www.eprints.org/results/
We have set up a server running the latest (i.e. most unstable) version of EPrints 2 at demoprints.eprints.org. Poke it, prod it, type in Kanji, and see what happens. Please don't report bugs yet, but interface comments are welcome.
EPrints 2 Alpha-1 has been released! Please see the EPrints 2 page for more information.
By popular demand a non-technical list for discussion of issues relating to eprints - for people who don't care about the UNIXy details but do care about what the end result does. See the Mailing List Page for more details.
Cite Base is a prototype OAI harvester, which harvests from both cogprints (a site running eprints) and other archives which support OAI. Tim Brody, the author of Cite Base, and I (Chris Gutteridge) are both in the same department and have been sharing ideas and insights.
We have set up a new mailing list for people interested in the administration and development of eprints.org software. See the Mailing List Page for more details.
Version 1.1.1 Includes support for Open Archives Protocol 1.0, See the download page for a list of improvements.
Please participate in important survey of users and non-users of Eprint Archives: http://www.eprints.org/survey/
[This survey is now closed. The results are available here]