Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 18:34:00 +0800
From: Catherine Candee <catherine.candee_at_ucop.edu>
Director, Scholarly Communication Initiatives
California Digital Library
University of California
To eScholarship Partners:
A number of you have inquired about eScholarship's ePrint Repositories,
so I am taking the liberty of assuming this will be of interest to the
group.
A few points about ePrint archives:
(1) The prototype repositories which have just been established are a
core piece of the infrastructure for the eScholarship experiment. From
the start, eScholarship has been the focus of CDL's effort to exploit
the possibilities of digital technologies to meet the needs and desires
of faculty and researchers, and to promote fundamental change in the
scholarly communication system. We believe that discipline-based
archives which encourage self-publishing hold great promise for
stimulating open dissemination of scholarship, for focusing and
simplifying the problem of persistent access to that scholarship, and
for expanding the possibilities for integration within and across
disciplines.
(2) We are able to offer the repositories at this time because of the
timely development and release of excellent self-archiving software
called "ePrints" by the Electronics and Computer Science Department of
the University of Southampton. The software is already running under
Cogprints, the Cognitive Science ePrints Archive, and is inter-operable
with other Open Archive Initiative (OAI) compliant archives. There is
more information about the software at our web site
http://escholarship.cdlib.org/ and at
http://eprints.cdlib.org/
and at
http://www.eprints.org/
(3) The first three repositories are being made available to
communities with widely divergent needs and thus will call for slightly
differing functionality and tools in their support. An editorial or
advisory board has been named to oversee the use and development of
each of the repositories, and distinct peer-reviewed scholarly products
will be drawn from or associated with them. In the case of the
Dermatology Online Journal, which migrated to CDL servers last July,
the journal may exist as a kind of overlay to the broader contents of
their repository; in CIAS publications, digital monographs will be
created from the contents of the international and area studies
repository; and within the Tobacco Control research community, the
repository will be available for new research stimulated by the vast
digital archives in the new Legacy National Tobacco Documents Library
at the University of California, San Francisco.
As more repositories are added, and the current repositories are
further developed, we will feed back into the community the lessons
we've learned along the way. In the end, we hope our effort will
contribute broadly to our mutual effort to improve scholarly
communication.
Again, thank you for your interest in the eScholarship program. Please
do not hesitate to contact me with further questions.
Catherine H. Candee
Director, Scholarly Communication Initiatives
California Digital Library
University of California
300 Lakeside Drive 6th Floor
Oakland, CA 94612-3550
510.987.0425
510.893.5212 (Fax)
Catherine.Candee_at_ucop.edu
______________________________________
Received on Wed Jan 03 2001 - 19:17:43 GMT