SPARC E-News 08-09/2001 |
http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6
>From the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
http://www.arl.org/sparc responses to: alison_at_arl.org
Review: Eprints.org Software
(Editor's Note: With this issue of SPARC e-news, we inaugurate a
periodic feature that focuses on evaluating technology solutions which
enable a more open scientific publishing marketplace. SPARC believes
in providing active support for scholar-led publishing initiatives
that offer transformative potential, and we offer this review of the
Eprints software in the hope that it may encourage interested
parties.)
Eprints.org Software: A Review
Ed Sponsler and Eric F. Van de Velde
eds_at_library.caltech.edu
evdv_at_library.caltech.edu
California Institute of Technology
Stevan Harnad just made it easy to join him in his quest to free the
scholarly literature. Download Eprints software from
http://www.eprints.org/, and build your own repositories quickly and
easily. Developed by Harnad collaborators Robert Tansley and Chris
Gutteridge, Eprints provides a web interface for managing, submitting,
discovering, and downloading documents. Eprints repositories are
compliant with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI)
(
http://www.openarchives.org). Therefore, once a repository is
registered as an OAI data provider, OAI-aware information services
will be able to discover its content.
This review is based on our eight-month experience with Eprints.
During this time, we built several technical-report repositories and
one online conference proceedings. Our repositories are available at
http://library.caltech.edu/digital.
Setup, Configuration, and Administration
The cost of getting started is minimal. An experimental system,
suitable for initial testing and even for hosting a few small
production repositories, costs less than $1000. Obviously, one must
move up to higher price and performance points when the number and
size of the repositories, the number of users, and the performance
requirements increase. Eprints requires the Linux operating system
with a standard configuration of supporting software:
Apache, the web server
MySQL, the relational database
Perl, the scripting language
Various plug-in modules for Perl
The operating system and all of the supporting software are Open
Source software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
(See
http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl.html.) Eprints developers intend
to make Eprints officially Open Source as soon as they have
implemented certain critical features. In the meantime, the University
of Southampton holds the copyright, but it allows users to view,
modify, and redistribute the source code. This is very close to being
Open Source in the GPL sense. (See
http://www.eprints.org/download.php
for full details.)
After installing the basic software, one must configure the
Eprints system for local use:
Customize the look and feel of the local Eprints web site by
adapting scripts that control the presentation. These scripts are
well separated from the core Eprints code that deals with archiving,
database management, and internal workflow. Therefore, we expect
that future upgrades will leave the customized scripts largely
unaffected. Decide what metadata fields to use for describing a
document.
Decide what metadata fields to present to the user during a
search.
Set up subject hierarchies that provide meaningful browsing
options to users.
Register the repository with OAI. Since OAI is a built-in
feature, the registration is easy.
The repository is now ready to accept documents. Authors place
documents in a temporary storage buffer. Before moving documents from
the buffer to the public area, Caltech librarians perform the
following quality-control checks:
Enforce repository policies with respect to author affiliation,
subject area, departmental approval process, or any other criteria
appropriate for each repository. Verify and (if necessary) improve
the metadata. Good metadata enhance discoverability.
Check document formats:
Ensure online readability of all submitted documents.
Convert documents to formats that conform to best
practices.
Take one of the following actions:
Return the document with comment to the author.
Reject and delete the document.
Accept the document.
Create a unique document identifier. We create our own persistent
identifiers independently of the Eprints system. This is a
safeguard in case we switch from Eprints to another system in the
future. As much as we like Eprints now, better systems may come
along. Moreover, no one can guarantee the long-term survival of any
software. (A detailed description of our identifiers and associated
resolver will be self-archived in the caltechLIB repository at
http://library.caltech.edu/digital.)
Create browse pages. We generate a browseable view of the repository
by executing Eprints-supplied scripts on a regular nightly schedule.
These scripts generate static web pages containing subject-grouped
lists of links to documents in the repository.
User Features
Eprints supports any type of document format, including HTML, Adobe
PDF, and PostScript. However, repository administrators should
carefully consider which formats they are willing to support and
maintain.
Authors must create a repository account in order to be able to
submit documents. The repository administrator controls what
information is requested and what information can be used to create
metadata for submitted documents. Readers are encouraged to create
an account. Registered users may set up an e-mail alerting service
for new content in their subject areas.
The current version of Eprints assigns each user a password. This
is somewhat of an annoyance. Because users cannot choose their
passwords, they are likely to forget them.
Overall Evaluation
EPrints is a powerful and inexpensive solution for sharing scholarly
works with the world, a concept Harnad calls "self-archiving." The
web-based submission process is intuitive and requires minimal effort
on the part of authors. However, long-term preservation requires an
institutional commitment. The Caltech Library System is committed to
preserve indefinitely those documents that are self-archived in its
repositories. To this end, the library performs quality checks on
submitted documents and metadata, enforces repository policies, and
assigns persistent identifiers. Eprints gives us web-based tools to
perform these management tasks efficiently.
Eprints validates many of Harnad's claims. It is possible for
researchers to make their research freely available to everyone,
increasing the impact of their research in the process. Because of
Ginsparg's arXiv, physicists already profit from this revolution in
scholarly communication. With Eprints and the Open Archives
Initiative, the fundamental building blocks are in place to spread
this revolution to all other disciplines. The only roadblock is the
willingness of researchers to experiment with this new
scholarly-communication model.
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2001, SPARC - The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources
Coalition Unless otherwise noted, copyright is held by SPARC.
Permission is granted to reproduce and distribute or post.
Posted: October 2, 2001
Received on Fri Oct 05 2001 - 16:36:18 BST