How and Why to Free the Refereed Research Literature Now

[Stevan Harnad]

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.

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Stevan Harnad                     harnad at cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Science    harnad at 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           

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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)


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